Riverine settlement in the evolution of prehistoricland-use systems in the Middle Rio Grande Valley,

New Mexico

Joseph A. Tainterl and Bonnie Bagley Tainter2

Abstract.-Ecosystem management should be based on the fullest possibleknowledge of ecological structures and processes. In prehistoric NorthAmerica, the involvement of Indian populations in ecosystem processesranged from inadvertent alteration of the distribution and abundance of spe-cies to large-scale management of landscapes. The knowledge needed tomanage ecosystems today is incomplete without understanding past humaninvolvement in ecological processes, and the adjustments of ecosystems tohuman components. This paper describes changes in prehistoric land use inpart of the Middle Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico. Processes of economicchange, land-use intensification, and regional abandonment suggest thatthere were periods of significant prehistoric disturbance to both upland andvalley ecosystems.

INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL SCIENCE INECOSYSTEM RESEARCH

One advantage of the growing role of socialscientists in Forest Service research is the opportu-nity for both social and biophysical scientists tooffer fresh perspectives on each other’s assump-tions and approaches. Every scientist and everymanager works with a set of professional assump-tions that, on a daily basis, usually remains im-plicit. To a scientist from another field these as-sumptions can take on fresh meanings, and per-haps yield different perspectives.

An emerging research topic that promisesfruitful collaboration between social and biophysi-cal scientists is understanding the human role inthe evolution of North American ecosystems. The

’ Research Archaeologist, USDA Forest Service, Rocky Moun-fain Forest and Range Experiment Station and Project Leader,Cultural Heritage Research Work Unit, located in Albuquerque,NM.

“Archaeologist, editor, and independent consultant; P.O. BOJT145, Corrales, NM 87048.

early notion of North American Indians as low-density dwellers in a primordial garden is givingway to a more realistic view. The prehistoricoccupants of this continent lived at times in dense,concentrated populations. In some places theymodified landscapes to increase production of theresources that they needed. In other places theymanipulated vegetation to select for early seralstages and to increase the abundance of particularprey species (Lewis 1973; Cronon 1983; Kay 1995;Sullivan 1995). It is no longer possible to think ofNorth America as a pristine wilderness at the timeof European contact. It now seems clear that whatEuropeans encountered in this continent wereecosystems that had been changing for millenniaalong with, and in response to, American Indianpopulations that grew many times in size anddensity, and whose societies came to be increas-ingly complex and to require higher and higherlevels of resources (e.g., Tainter 1988: 178-187; 1995).

Viewing the prehistory of North Americanecosystems in this way leads to significant ques-tions about environmental conditions today. At afairly obvious level it leads one to ask what is

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meant by terms such as reerence conditions, vestora-+ion, or range ofnatural (or historic) variation (e.g.,Wright, Chapman, and Jimerson 1995), andwhether these terms are thought to apply to eco-systems without human involvement. At a moresubtle level, if ecosystem management involvesmanaging with a knowledge of the structures andprocesses of ecosystems, that knowledge mustremain significantly incomplete without an under-standing of the past human role in ecosystemprocesses. Indeed, one might assert that we lackmuch fundamental knowledge of how NorthAmerican ecosystems functioned before A.D. 1500(cf. Cartledge and Propper 1993). If we are to under-stand reference conditions, we need to know howecosystems have functioned with human compo-nents that ranged from low-density foragers to high-intensity occupations by people who deliberatelymanipulated their environments, and who retainedand transmitted environmental knowledge throughmyth, ritual, and oral traditions (cf. Gunn 1994).

Although we can pose such queries, we cannotyet say definitively what their implications are.

Though we know that American Indians in prehis-tory were integral parts of ecosystems, the investi-gation of cultural-ecological processes in the past isonly coming to be recognized as important. In thispaper we will discuss the prehistory of an area thatwitnessed dramatic transformations in the patternsof its human occupation over a period of morethan 7,000 years. The patterns of this occupationhave important implications for the evolution oflocal ecosystems, including disturbance processes.

PREHISTORIC LAND USE IN THEMIDDLE RIO GRANDE VALLEY

The area of this study extends from the RioGrande Valley on the east to the Rio Puerto on thewest, and from about the confluence of the RioJemez and the Rio Grande on the north to justsouth of Albuquerque on the south (fig. 1). Lyingbetween the Rio Grande and Rio Puerto basins is abroad, eroded tableland known colloquiallv as theWest Mesa (and called more properly the &/XI de

Figure 1. The Middle Rio Grande study area.

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Albuquerque). It is a low feature, rising no morethan about 225 m. above the floodplains. TheAlbuquerque West Mesa is a desert grasslandcontaining riverine gravels and erosional remnantsof the ancestral Rio Grande. It is devoid of flowingsurface water, and the 19th century historian andexplorer Adolph Bandelier even described it as“...waterless, bleak, and bare” (1892: 309).

To Euro-Americans, the most desirable land-scapes within this area are the fertile river valleys.These are where Hispanic and Anglo-Americanfarmers settled first. It is therefore surprising tolearn that in perhaps 12,000 years of occupation byAmerican Indians, the Rio Grande and Rio Puertovalleys are where aboriginal populations came tosettle lust. The early Native American use of thisregion appears actually to have clustered in pre-cisely those areas that, in a Euro-American view,are most marginal. This apparent paradox illus-trates the inherent variability in cultural percep-tions of landscapes, and the flexibility of humaninvolvement in landscape processes.

The long time span from about 5500 B.C. to 0A.D. is called by archaeologists the Archaicperiod. The mode of subsistence throughout thistime was hunting and gathering. Some time in thelast millennium B.C. small amounts of maize wereadded to the diet, but people did not come to dependon agriculture until after about 500 A.D. (Glassow1972; Hegmon 1995). If is in the context of a hunt-ing and gathering economy that we can under-stand the early prehistoric landscape preferences.

The hunting and gathering populations of theArchaic period appear to have concentrated ini-tially for at least part of the year on the upperreaches of the Arroyo Cuervo, which is a tributaryof the Rio l’uerco (fig. 2). Among the reasons forchoosing this area are the occurrence of veryreliable sources of water in the form of seeps at theheads of side canyons (Irwin-Williams 1973), andthe fact that the Arroyo Cuervo has some of thehighest topographic diversity in the region.

The topographic diversity in particular helps toexplain why early foragers preferred this area to

Figure 2. Archaic site distribution, ca. 5500 B.C.-O A.D.

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the river valleys. At the end of the Pleistocene,vegetation zones were lower in elevation than theyare today. The West Mesa would have supported aponderosa pine forest, with spruce and fir on thehighest ridges (Judge 1973: 40). With the dryingand warming of succeeding millennia, vegetationzones migrated higher in elevation and northward,and the Pleistocene megafauna became extinct.The economy established locally in response tothese changes is generally considered to have beena mixture of hunting prey species such as deer,antelope, and rabbits, and gathering plant foodssuch as grass seeds, forbs, succulent seeds andfruits, early season greens, and pinyon nuts. Suchresources are widely but discontinuously distrib-uted throughout the Upper Sonoran life zone,which today encompasses all of the study area.

For a hunting and gathering population in anarid region, survival depends on mobility. Asedible plants ripen at different locations through-out the year, a population of human consumersmust continuously reposition themselves on the

landscape. Transportation of food by peopletypically has a high energetic cost (Lightfoot 1979).Food transported as little as 100 km. may cost asmuch as l/3 of its energy value in consumption byhuman bearers (Culbert 1988: 93). It is generallynecessary, therefore, for hunter-gatherers to moveconsumers to resources rather than resources toconsumers. The entire population must be mobile.A yearly seasonal round for Southwestern foragersnught have started with a move to lower elevationsfor early spring greens, movement throughout midelevational ranges from late spring through earlyfall to take advantage of seed-bearing plants andsucculent fruits, then to higher elevations in thefall to gather pinyon nuts and engage in late-seasonhunting of ungulates. If the pinyon crop was particu-larly good, winter occupation would have had tobe near where the nuts were gathered and stored.

Topographic diversity can ameliorate the needfor high mobility. In a landscape with significantaltitudinal variation, a variety of edible plant foodsbecomes available throughout the year. These are

Figure 3. Basketmaker II site distribution, ca. O-500 A.D.

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separated by large vertical distances but smallhorizontal distances. A topographically diverselandscape allows hunters and gatherers to obtain ayearly round of resources with less mobility thanwould otherwise be necessary (Tainter and Gillio1980: 17). In a landscape that is highly diverse, aforaging population might even be able to becomesedentary, and exploit a full range of resourcesfrom a single location. The topographic diversity ofthe Arroyo Cuervo region does much to explainwhy the Archaic-period American Indian popula-tions preferred to settle in an area that Euro-Americans consider useful for little more thancattle raising.

The main investigator of the archaeological sitesin the Arroyo Cuervo region, the late CynthiaIrwin-Williams, found evidence of populationgrowth in the prehistory of the area, particularlyafter about 3,000 B.C. (Irwin-Williams 1973).Although the population of hunter-gatherersprobably never exceeded an average of one personper one or two square kilometers, in time this

growing population led to predictable consequences.From about 3,000 to 2,000 B.C. onward there wasincreasingly intenswe use of the West Mesa (Reinhart1967; Campbell and Ellis 1952; Tainter and Gillio1980: 46-48). where people built structures, prob-ably of stone, brush, and hides, for short-termoccupation (Deni Seymour, personal communica-tion, 1995). In the Arroyo Cuervo region stones forbreaking and grinding seeds and nuts were addedto the technology, suggesting that these foodsplayed an increasingly important part in the diet.

After about 2,000 B.C. the pace of change quick-ened. Larger social groups formed at the ArroyoCuervo canyon heads (Irwin-Williams 1973: ll),and there may have been greater social integrationthrough ritual. By the end of the last millenniumB.C. the residents of the West Mesa were occupy-ing sand dune-covered ridges overlooking drain-ages, and building more substantial subterraneanstructures (Reinhart 1967).

In the first few centuries A.D. continued growthof population made the hunting and gathering

Figure 4. Basketmaker Ill-Pueblo II site distribution, ca. 500-1100 A.D.

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economy untenable, and brought a dramatictransformation in patterns of land use (fig. 3)(Irwin-Williams 1973; Reinhart 1967; Tainter’andGillio 1980: 45-48). Agriculture became the mainbasis of subsistence, possibly quite rapidly. Byabout 500 to 700 A.D. maize appears to have had arole in the economy as great as it had at Europeancontact (Hegmon 1995). The use of pottery becamewidespread, as it was useful for reconstituting andcooking dried maize. The bow and arrow wereadopted, suggesting a change in hunting strategies(Glassow 1972,198O).

In the Arroyo Cuervo region the canyon heads,which had been occupied for perhaps 6,000 years,were abandoned some time after 600 A.D. in favorof the cultivable valley bottoms (fig. 4). The higher-elevation parts of the West Mesa were never againused as intensively. In the last few centuries A.D.there was a substantial occupation on the easternrim of the West Mesa, along washes with gentlegradients suitable for floodplain agriculture (Frisbie1967; Allan 1975; Tainter and Gillio 1980: 47). The

labor requirements for cultivating, tending, andharvesting agricultural fields, and the difficulty intransporting large harvests, meant that hereafterpopulations had to be largely sedentary (Wills andHuckell 1994: 50-51). As mobility was reduced,land use became increasingly intensive in thevicinity of sedentary communities.

The period from about 1000 to 1400 A.D. wit-nessed even more dramatic transformations. TheRio Puerto Valley supported a dense agriculturalpopulation (fig. 5) (Fritz 1973; Washburn 1972,1974; Burns 1978; Pippin 1987), which farmed thefloodplain and its side drainages. In some yearsthey had temporary fields in the Arroyo Cuervobut this area was, for the most part, abandoned.Populations that clustered around a site calledGuadalupe Ruin were part of a regional politicaland economic system centered in Chaco Canyon tothe west U’ippin 1987; Tainter 1984, 1988: 178.187,1994; Tainter and Plog 1994). By 1350 A.D. theupper Rio Puerto Valley was abandoned bv farm-ing populations. The reasons for this are still

Figure 5.Pueblo III site distribution, ca. 1100-1300 A.D.

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unclear, but then as now the area is highly suscep-tible to erosion (Burns 1978).

The abandonment of the upper Rio Puerto waspart of a broader process. During the course of the14th century A.D. much of the upland areas ofwhat are now western New Mexico, and easternand northern Arizona, were abruptly abandoned.The populations that survived this crisis (Cordell1995) concentrated thereafter in a few areas, in-cluding the Rio Grande Valley (fig. 6) (Wendorf1954; Wendorf and Reed 1955; Collins 1975;Dickson 1979; Tainter n.d.). This area came to beused intensively for the first time, and large com-munities were established on a scale never seenbefore. The entire region experienced a profounddiscontinuity in its pattern of cultural evolution.Settlement patterns changed from dispersed toaggregated. Social complexity increased in re-sponse to the problems posed by large aggrega-tions of people. Ritual systems of social integra-tion, such as the Katchina Cult, were adopted(Schaafsma and Schaafsma 1974). Parts of the

valley bottom were farmed at a level of intensitynot seen again until the 19th century. In 12,000years of native occupation, it was the most signifi-cant and far-reaching transformation in land andresource use.

PREHISTORIC SE-ITLEMENT ANDDISTURBANCE PROCESSES

Although we need a much deeper understand-ing of these changes in land use, our presentknowledge has implications for understandingecosystem disturbance processes in prehistory.While there are various definitions in ecology ofwhat constitutes a “disturbance” (e.g., the defini-tions cited in Lundquist, Geils, and Negron [1995:781; and Wright, Chapman, and Jimerson [1995:2591), for this study a definition given to me re-cently by Russell Graham seems most useful: adisturbance is anything that alters a trajectory or atrend (personal communication, 1995). The mas-

Figure 6. Pueblo IV site distribution, ca. 1300-1600 A.D.

sive convergence of human populations on thenorthern and middle Rio Grande Valley in the 14thcentury A.D. would certainly appear to qualify.Within a few generations this area went fromsupporting a small, dispersed agricultural popula-tion, to supporting much of the remaining popula-tion from large parts of the Southwest. Communi-ties of up to 2,000 to 3,000 rooms were built. Landswere cleared for agriculture, and every piece ofwood useful for construction, cooking, or heatingwould quickly have been consumed within easywalking distance. The distribution and abundanceof native plant and animal species would havebeen altered in a short time, as would nutrientcycling and the composition of soils. It is importantto ask how Rio Grande Basin ecosystems wouldhave evolved subsequently, and up to today, if thismassive disturbance had not occurred.

This pattern of disturbance was continued andintensified with the Hispanic and Anglo-Americanintrusions in the 16th through 19th centuries. TheHispanic entrada in the 17th century would, at leastinitially, have amounted to little more than thereplacement of the portion of the American Indianpopulation that in the previous century had beenlost to European diseases (cf. Ramenofsky 1987).Yet the Hispanic introduction of cattle and sheephad far-reaching environmental consequences,which became particularly acute with the incorpo-ration of New Mexico into the North American andinternational economies in the 19th century (Scurlock1995; Wozniak 19951. The Puebloan intrusion in the14th century and the Euro-American settlement werethe most severe disturbances to Rio Grande Basinecosystems since the end of the Pleistocene.

The earlier role of hunter-gatherer populationsin ecosvstem processes of the Arroyo Cuervo andWest Mesa presents a subtler problem. We knowthat in other parts of North America, hunting andgathering populations actively manipulatedvegetation to increase the production of useableresources (e.g., Lewis 1973). Whether this wasdone prehistorically in the Arroyo Cuervo/WestMesa region is not yet known, but research else-where in the Southwest is showing how to investi-gate this possibility (Sullivan 1995). Certainly aspopulation in the area grew, there would havebeen increasing pressures to manipulate vegeta-tion. Even without such manipulation, the fact thatthere were 6,000 years of intense human use of this

area suggests that the forager population was amajor ecosystem component. Certainly the hunter-gatherers would have had a controlling influenceon such factors as the distribution and abundanceof seed-bearing plants, ungulates that they hunted,rodents that were attracted to their food stores,carnivore populations, tree growth in the pinyon-juniper zone, accessibility of water for wildlife,nutrient cycling, soil formation, and erosion. Over6,000 years, humans were as integral to these ecosys-tems as nearly any other component. If disturbanceis considered to be the disruption of a trend, thenthe human occupation of the Arroyo Cuervo andWest Mesa suggests what some may consider acounterintuitive notion: the greatest disturbance tothese ecosystems may have been the zuithdrawal ofthe human population in the 7th to 8th centuriesA.D. Certainly a great variety of ecosystem struc-tures and processes, which had been regulated for6,000 years by gradually intensifying human use,would suddenlv have had to establish new rangesof tolerance and adjust to new conditions.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Ecosystem management is a developing fieldthat has yet to delineate the full range of pertinentstructures and processes. The human populationsof North America have been an essential part ofthese structures and processes, even a controllingpart in some cases. They can no more be left out ofecosystem analyses than can, for example,paleoclimate. In the Arroyo Cuervo and WestMesa areas, the processes of ecosystem adjustmentafter the human withdrawal should be understoodbefore we can be confident that we know thesesystems well enough to manage them. Ecosystemresearch and management of the future has tocombine the findings not only of contemporaryenvironmental and social sciences, but of thehistorical sciences as well. It is from that combina-tion, and only from that combination, that thedelineation of historical reference conditions, rangesof variation, and disturbance processes will emerge.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are pleased to acknowledge the assistance ofseveral people in the preparation of this paper.

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Timothy Seaman of the Archeological RecordsManagement System, New Mexico Historic Preser-vation Division, kindly prepared the data sets usedin the analysis. Shirley Baros showed us the capa-bilities of the University of New Mexico Earth DataAnalysis Center (EDAC), where the site distribu-tions were plotted on a September 1992 Landsatimage. Sarah Fruit prepared the data sets andThomas Budge plotted and photographed theimages. Finally we are grateful to Douglas Shawand Deborah Finch for the invitation to preparethis paper. Their recognition of the need to inte-grate social, historical, and biophysical research inland management points to the direction in whichall environmental research needs to proceed.

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