The Arizona State University Legacies on the Landscape research project is focused on understanding relationships between the social, environmental, and economic contexts of past land use and human-driven environmental change. In particular, the project is focused on identifying the contexts within which prehistoric human decision making produces persistent ecological changes that are still detectable on the landscape today. Our case study is the Perry Mesa region in the arid American Southwest, which was the location of a pulse in human occupation by agriculturalists ca. A.D. 1275-1400.

Results/Conclusions

Results of recent archaeological investigations of settlement patterns, agricultural fields, as well as demographic and paleoclimatic reconstructions will be presented and discussed to provide a context for the prehistoric agricultural and residential land use by the occupants of Perry Mesa. The prehistoric population of this region occupied both large aggregated villages as well as small dispersed farmsteads across the landscape. Agricultural land use was also spatially extensive as is evidenced by the wide spread distribution of agricultural features such as terraces, rock piles, and check dams. Detailed ecological studies of habitation sites and agricultural features suggest that prehistoric land use modified large portions of the environment in measurable ways. Thus, this study suggests that even relatively small scale agricultural activities and short occupations by relatively small numbers of people can have extensive and enduring consequences for ecosystem structure and function that need to be considered in ecological characterizations of contemporary landscapes and modern management programs.