| Legacies
on the Landscape The Legacies project is a collaborative effort by archaeologists and ecologists to investigate the legacy of prehistoric and modern human land use on the Perry Mesa region of Agua Fria National Monument north of the Phoenix Basin. We are working to reconstruct key ecological and archaeological features of the landscape before, during, and after the prehistoric agricultural land-use of AD 1275-1400. I have been a part of this research team since 2003. See this link for more information about the Legacies on the Landscape project. Agricultural Land Use in the Perry Mesa Region, Central Arizona For my graduate research I am investigating the prehistoric agricultural landscape of the Perry Mesa Region. I located runoff agricultural features typical of the region and documented their environmental setting for my master’s paper. I then created a landscape scale GIS model of potential agricultural land for the region and compared the amounts of potentially arable land around the several size classes of residential sites. Results of this analysis are published in Kiva. For my dissertation I will begin to focus on the social, spatial, and technological organization of small scale runoff agriculture in the Perry Mesa region. I am most interested in how formers adopt strategies to deal with the risks and vulnerabilities of farming in arid, marginal environments of the US southwest and the sustainability and resilience of those strategies. |
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Environmental Impacts of Prehistoric Land Use in the Perry Mesa Region, Central Arizona As part of the larger Legacies project I have been involved in several small studies aimed at documenting the types of environmental impacts of the prehistoric occupation in this region. These studies range from documenting differences in vegetation communities and differences in soil properties on and off prehistoric agricultural fields (with Hoski Schaafsma) to the documentation of the anthropogenic influences on agave species. 2008. The Scale and Role of Agave Production in the Perry Mesa Region, Central Arizona. Poster presented at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Vancouver, April 26-30. [pdf] 2007 The Agricultural Landscape of Perry Mesa: Modeling Residential Site Location in Relation to Arable Land. The Kiva 73(1): 89-106. 2007 Landscape Legacies of Prehistoric Agricultural Land-use in the Perry Mesa Region, Central Arizona. Paper presented at the 2007 Visiting Scholar Conference, The Archaeology of Anthropogenic Environments, March 23-24, Center for Archaeological Research, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois. M. Kruse and H. Schaafsma. 2006 Ecology needs archaeologists:
Archaeology needs ecologists. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment
4(4): 180-188. Briggs, J.M., K. A. Spielmann, H. Schaafsma, K. W.
Kintigh, M. Kruse, K. Morehouse and K. Schollmeyer.
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