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Every day 37,000 people leave their homes and join the 258 million migrants who live in a different country from where they were born (1, 2). And experts believe that the number of migrants will continue to grow. Climate change alone is expected to force 200 million people to leave their homeland by the year 2050 (3), and some expect the number to reach 1 billion by the year 2100 (4, 5). Routinely, we hear that these numbers are unprecedented, that this level of migration is unsustainable, and that these migrants threaten our way of life. Are these claims right? Texts about the founding of early medieval monastic sites in Ireland, such as St. Colman’s Abbey on the island of Inishbofin (pictured here with a 12th-century church), portrayed the sites as interregional religious and cultural hubs. But recent archaeological research using chemical analyses on similar early medieval Irish monastic sites suggests that few nonlocals were buried at such places (2). Such a relatively low level of migration may have been attributable to laws that restricted individual’s rights outside of their natal territories. The truthful answer is, “we don’t know.” What is clear is that if we are to create migration policies that balance the human rights of migrants with the security concerns of host populations, we will need evidence-based answers to these questions and others like them. At least some of those answers will be found in our past, and the researchers best suited for this task are archaeologists. > What is clear is that if we are to create migration policies that balance the human rights of migrants with the security concerns of host populations, we will need evidence-based answers to these questions and others like them. Studies using the rich corpus of contemporary demographic, sociological, economic, and … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: jhaltschul{at}canelogroup.net. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

George L. Cowgill had a major influence on the study of the ancient city of Teotihuacan and the development and promotion of quantitative methods in archaeology. His wit, teaching, and research influenced many in the profession. We draw on two published autobiographical works (Cowgill 2008a, 2013a), some unpublished autobiographical notes (Cowgill 1983), his many publications, and our own associations with George.

Spatially and temporally unpredictable rainfall patterns presented food production challenges to small-scale agricultural communities, requiring multiple risk-mitigating strategies to increase food security. Although site-based investigations of the relationship between climate and agricultural production offer insights into how individual communities may have created long-term adaptations to manage risk, the inherent spatial variability of climate-driven risk makes a landscape-scale perspective valuable. In this article, we model risk by evaluating how the spatial structure of ancient climate conditions may have affected the reliability of three major strategies used to reduce risk: drawing upon social networks in time of need, hunting and gathering of wild resources, and storing surplus food. We then explore how climate-driven changes to this reliability may relate to archaeologically observed social transformations. We demonstrate the utility of this methodology by comparing the Salinas and Cibola regions in the prehispanic U.S. Southwest to understand the complex relationship among climate-driven threats to food security, risk-mitigation strategies, and social transformations. Our results suggest key differences in how communities buffered against risk in the Cibola and Salinas study regions, with the structure of precipitation influencing the range of strategies to which communities had access through time.

Settlement surveys that yield counts of the number of houses or rooms dated to a chronological period can be used to indicate population and to estimate rates of population growth or decline. Population estimates and population growth rates are, of course, interpretively critical for describing and explaining many aspects of social dynamics. For this sort of survey data, population growth rates can be estimated by applying an ordinary, compound interest formula to room counts, standardized by period length, for successive time periods. This article offers a more nuanced approach that simulates a continuous process of room construction and abandonment, yielding a total number of rooms occupied during a period. The modeled growth rate is the value at which the model total most closely matches the value observed in the settlement data, given the set of model parameters. The model results are sensitive to both structure use-life and the founding room count. This sensitivity does not reflect a defect of the model. Instead it points to a major problem of equifinality—a great variety of different processes could account for the observed data. Exploration of three cases shows that reviewing the model results for a range of combinations of reasonable parameter values can provide demographic insights that are more informative—and can be markedly different—than those provided by the standard formula.

While our fascination with understanding the past is sufficient to warrant an increased focus on synthesis, solutions to important problems facing modern society require understandings based on data that only archaeology can provide. Yet, even as we use public monies to collect ever-greater amounts of data, modes of research that can stimulate emergent understandings of human behavior have lagged behind. Consequently, a substantial amount of archaeological inference remains at the level of the individual project. We can more effectively leverage these data and advance our understandings of the past in ways that contribute to solutions to contemporary problems if we adapt the model pioneered by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis to foster synthetic collaborative research in archaeology. We propose the creation of the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis coordinated through a U.S.-based National Center for Archaeological Synthesis. The coalition will be composed of established public and private organizations that provide essential scholarly, cultural heritage, computational, educational, and public engagement infrastructure. The center would seek and administer funding to support collaborative analysis and synthesis projects executed through coalition partners. This innovative structure will enable the discipline to address key challenges facing society through evidentially based, collaborative synthetic research.

It is commonplace to assert causal relationships between episodes of extreme climate with dramatic cultural shifts. We explore the problem of statistically assessing the correspondence between episodes of extreme climate (such as droughts) and cultural events (such as depopulation) they are purported to explain. In order to do this: 1) We describe a method that permits the objective identification of climate extremes in a way that is independent of their supposed causal outcomes; 2) We discuss how we identify and date cultural transitions of interest; 3) We explore a variety of decision rules for determining whether or not there is a match between a given extreme climate interval and the interval during which a transition began; and 4) We propose an intuitive Monte Carlo approach to statistically assess the observed correspondence between the climate extremes and the cultural transitions. Our application does not indicate statistical support for a linkage between intervals of extreme climate and major transitions in any of the seven cultural traditions in the Southwest US that we examined.

Hundreds of thousands of archaeological investigations in the United States conducted over the last several decades have documented a large portion of the recovered archaeological record in the United States. However, if we are to use this enormous corpus to achieve richer understandings of the past, it is essential that both CRM and academic archaeologists change how they manage their digital documents and data over the course of a project and how this information is preserved for future use. We explore the nature and scope of the problem and describe how it can be addressed. In particular, we argue that project workflows must ensure that the documents and data are fully documented and deposited in a publicly accessible, digital repository where they can be discovered, accessed, and reused to enable new insights and build cumulative knowledge.

Diversity is generally valued, although it sometimes contributes to difficult social situations, as is recognized in recent social science literature. Archaeology can provide insights into how diverse social situations play out over the long term. There are many kinds of diversities, and we propose representational diversity as a distinct category. Representational diversity specifically concerns how and whether differences are marked or masked materially. We investigate several archaeological sequences in the U.S. Southwest. Each began with the coming together of populations that created situations of unprecedented social diversity; some resulted in conflict, others in long-term stability. We trace how representational diversity changed through these sequences. Specifically, we review the transregional Kayenta migration to the southern Southwest and focus empirical analyses on regional processes in the Cibola region and on painted ceramics. Results show that, initially, representational diversity increased above and beyond that caused by the combination of previously separate traditions as people marked their differences. Subsequently, in some instances, the diversity was replaced by widespread homogeneity as the differences were masked and mitigated. Although the social causes and effects of diversity are many and varied, long-term stability and persistence is associated with tolerance of a range of diversities.

Archaeology depends on, and generates, proxy paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental data. We review various initiatives, most quite recent, by which archaeologists seek to make these data more readily discoverable and useful, to facilitate the cumulation of research. Theme issue on BUILDING AND HARNESSING OPEN PALEODATA.EDITORS: John W. Williams, Alicia J. Newton, Darrell S. Kaufman and Lucien von Gunten VISEAD SEAD

Archaeological data and research results are essential to addressing such fundamental questions as the origins of human culture; the origin, waxing, and waning of civilizations and cities; the response of societies to long-term climate changes; and the systemic relationships implicated in human-induced changes in the environment. However, we lack the capacity for acquiring, managing, analyzing, and synthesizing the data sets needed to address important questions such as these. We propose investments in computational infrastructure that would transform archaeology’s ability to advance research on the field’s most compelling questions with an evidential base and inferential rigor that have heretofore been impossible. At the same time, new infrastructure would make archaeological data accessible to researchers in other disciplines. We offer recommendations regarding data management and availability, cyberinfrastructure tool building, and social and cultural changes in the discipline. We propose funding synthetic case studies that would demonstrate archaeology’s ability to contribute to transdisciplinary research on long-term social dynamics and serve as a context for developing computational tools and analytical workflows that will be necessary to attack these questions. The case studies would explore how emerging research in computer science could empower this research and would simultaneously provide productive challenges for computer science research.

In 1966 the US Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act. Its intent: to ensure that the values embedded in historic buildings, archaeological sites, and other important places of the past honored all Americans in ways that would inspire and motivate present and future generations. In the intervening 50 years, archaeologists have diligently discovered, documented, analyzed, and curated our collective past. Fig. 1. Public support can expand archeological finds and help tell the stories of people and places. Here, archaeological surveyors work in the Western Papagueria of Arizona. After laws protecting archaeological sites were passed in 1966, the number of recorded sites in the region ballooned from 100 to more than 2,000, which allowed researchers to document 10,000 years of human occupation in one of the hottest, driest parts of the United States. However, this rich store of data has untapped potential beyond documenting long-term trajectories of numerous human societies. Archaeological data can be key to expanding scientific understandings of human social dynamics, redressing injustices of the past, empowering local and descendant communities, and aiding in the formulation of solutions to contemporary problems. Collaborative synthetic research, as practiced in ecology and other sciences, has been a powerful driver for advancing interdisciplinary science. But to utilize these advances, archaeologists, as a community, need a means to bring disparate datasets together and interpret them. This entails creating a vehicle by which collaborative synthetic research becomes a routine and institutionalized practice in archaeology—a budding effort we call the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis. It’s an initiative that will not only benefit the discipline but will also enable researchers to communicate to the public the richly detailed stories of humanity itself. Many nations have laws protecting cultural heritage, and as a result, archaeologists have access to far more data than ever before. In the United States alone, … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: jhaltschul{at}sricrm.com. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

The Zuni/Cibola region of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico was the setting for some of the earliest formal archaeological investigations in the U.S. Southwest. From the outset, research in the region has been regional in scope, focusing in particular on issues of population movement, community organization, and social identity. Importantly, although the Cibola region is often treated as a single unit of analysis, the regional boundaries are crosscut by broader distinctions between the Anasazi or Ancestral Pueblo culture area to the north and the Mogollon culture area to the south. The apparent complexity of social boundaries in the Cibola region reflects a high degree of mobility and fluid social organization. Due in part to this complexity, the Cibola region has played a major role in conceptualizations of social and cultural identity in the Southwest for both archaeological research and cultural heritage legislation.

Addressing archaeology's most compelling substantive challenges requires synthetic research that exploits the large and rapidly expanding corpus of systematically collected archaeological data. That, in turn, requires a means of combining datasets that employ different systematics in their recording while at the same time preserving the semantics of the data. To that end, we have developed a general procedure that we call query-driven, on-the-fly data integration that is deployed within the Digital Archaeological Record digital repository. The integration procedure employs ontologies that are mapped to the original datasets. Integration of the ontology-based dataset representations is done at the time the query is executed, based on the specific content of the query. In this way, the original data are preserved, and data are aggregated only to the extent necessary to obtain semantic comparability. Our presentation draws examples from the largest application to date: an effort by a research community of Southwest US faunal analysts. Using 24 ontologies developed to cover a broad range of observed faunal variables, we integrate faunal data from 33 sites across the late prehistoric northern Southwest, including about 300,000 individually recorded faunal specimens.

This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest pay off will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.

Climate change can rapidly undermine ritual mechanisms that enhance social consensus, as shown for the Pueblo Southwest., Cycles of demographic and organizational change are well documented in Neolithic societies, but the social and ecological processes underlying them are debated. Such periodicities are implicit in the “Pecos classification,” a chronology for the pre-Hispanic U.S. Southwest introduced in Science in 1927 which is still widely used. To understand these periodicities, we analyzed 29,311 archaeological tree-ring dates from A.D. 500 to 1400 in the context of a novel high spatial resolution, annual reconstruction of the maize dry-farming niche for this same period. We argue that each of the Pecos periods initially incorporates an “exploration” phase, followed by a phase of “exploitation” of niches that are simultaneously ecological, cultural, and organizational. Exploitation phases characterized by demographic expansion and aggregation ended with climatically driven downturns in agricultural favorability, undermining important bases for social consensus. Exploration phases were times of socio-ecological niche discovery and development.

Significance Climate-induced disasters are impacting human well-being in ever-increasing ways. Disaster research and management recognize and emphasize the need to reduce vulnerabilities, although extant policy is not in line with this realization. This paper assesses the extent to which vulnerability to food shortage, as a result of social, demographic, and resource conditions at times of climatic challenge, correlates with subsequent declines in social and food security. Extreme climate challenges are identified in the prehispanic US Southwest and historic Norse occupations of the North Atlantic Islands. Cases with such different environmental, climatic, demographic, and cultural and social traditions allow us to demonstrate a consistent relationship between vulnerability and consequent social and food security conditions, applicable in multiple contexts.

(2010). Sustaining the Digital Archaeological Record. Heritage Management: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 264-274.

Numerous articles examine the relationship between men’s hunting skill and other important biological and social traits. We analyzed more than 14,000 hunter days during 27 years of monitoring the Ache of Paraguay by using resampling methods to demonstrate that large sample sizes are generally required in order to distinguish individual men by hunting skill. A small published study on !Kung hunters shows that large‐game hunters are even more difficult to distinguish by individual skill level. This is a serious problem because regressions using noisy hunting data as the independent variable systematically underestimate the association of hunting ability with other biosocial traits. The analysis suggests that some coresidents in many small‐scale societies will be unable to accurately distinguish hunters by skill level, possibly favoring groupwide meat‐sharing conventions and biased cultural transmission that emphasizes prestige rather than perceived hunting skill.

Scientific workflow management systems offer features for composing complex computational pipelines from modular building blocks, executing the resulting automated workflows, and recording the provenance of data products resulting from workflow runs. Despite the advantages such features provide, many automated workflows continue to be implemented and executed outside of scientific workflow systems due to the convenience and familiarity of scripting languages (such as Perl, Python, R, and MATLAB), and to the high productivity many scientists experience when using these languages. YesWorkflow is a set of software tools that aim to provide such users of scripting languages with many of the benefits of scientific workflow systems. YesWorkflow requires neither the use of a workflow engine nor the overhead of adapting code to run effectively in such a system. Instead, YesWorkflow enables scientists to annotate existing scripts with special comments that reveal the computational modules and dataflows otherwise implicit in these scripts. YesWorkflow tools extract and analyze these comments, represent the scripts in terms of entities based on the typical scientific workflow model, and provide graphical renderings of this workflow-like view of the scripts. Future version of YesWorkflow will also allow the prospective provenance of the data products of these scripts to be queried in ways similar to those available to users of scientific workflow systems.

To address archaeology’s most pressing substantive challenges, researchers must discover, access, and extract information contained in the reports and articles that codify so much of archaeology’s knowledge. These efforts will require application of existing and emerging natural language processing technologies to extensive digital corpora. Automated classification can enable development of metadata needed for the discovery of relevant documents. Although it is even more technically challenging, automated extraction of and reasoning with information from texts can provide urgently needed access to contextualized information within documents. Effective automated translation is needed for scholars to benefit from research published in other languages.

This forum reports the results of a National Science Foundation—funded workshop that focused on the integration and preservation of digital databases and other structured data derived from archaeological contexts. The workshop concluded that for archaeology to achieve its potential to advance long-term, scientific understandings of human history, there is a pressing need for an archaeological information infrastructure that will allow us to archive, access, integrate, and mine disparate data sets. This report provides an assessment of the informatics needs of archaeology, articulates an ambitious vision for a distributed disciplinary information infrastructure (cyberinfrastructure), discusses the challenges posed by its development, and outlines initial steps toward its realization. Finally, it argues that such a cyberinfrastructure has enormous potential to contribute to anthropology and science more generally. Concept-oriented archaeological data integration will enable the use of existing data to answer compelling new questions and permit syntheses of archaeological data that rely not on other investigators' conclusions but on analyses of meaningfully integrated new and legacy data sets.

Over the past five decades, ecologists and archaeologists have dismantled two longstanding theoretical constructs. Ecologists have rejected the “balance of nature” concept and archaeologists have dispelled the myth that indigenous people were “in harmony with nature”. Rejection of these concepts poses critical challenges to both fields as current disciplinary approaches are inadequate to grapple effectively with real-world complexities of socioecological systems. In this review, we focus on the relationship between human action and ecosystem change by examining some of the long-term impacts of prehistoric agriculture. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we present results from two studies that suggest that even relatively non-intensive and short-term agriculture can transform ecological systems for a very long time. It is therefore imperative that ecologists and archaeologists work more closely together, creating a truly cross-disciplinary alliance that will help to advance the fields of archaeology and ecology.

This paper presents the results of a juxtaposition of archaeological findings on Hohokam irrigation and ethnographic research on the social organization of irrigation. There are no ethnographic or historic records pertaining to the Hohokam, so the comparative ethnographic approach is perhaps more productive than in other situations. Several forms of canal irrigation organization are considered, including politically centralized, acephalous, private, and several forms of communal. We find that politically centralized, acephalous, and private forms are implausible in the Hohokam context. Several of the communal forms are plausible. We find no ethnographic basis for positing a valley-wide management system.

From a regional perspective, the late thirteenth-century aggregation of village populations into large towns in the northern Southwest appears to be a brief and dramatic episode of social reorganization. That it is apparent across such a range of cultural and ecological circumstances suggests that a regional perspective will be needed to understand why it occurred. However, if we are to understand how it occurred—the social processes involved in the aggregation of populations into large towns—a high resolution, long-term view of the settlement history of particular localities provides a necessary complement to the regional view. We present a detailed examination of the development of one town in the American Southwest, the large, prehistoric Zuni town of Heshot uła. Without the long-term demographic reconstruction made possible by a fine-grained seriation and full-coverage survey, we would have seen this key transition as much more rapid and much less closely tied to the local situation than it now appears to be. Although this pueblo was built about A.D. 1275, we argue that its appearance was, at once, the culmination of demographic processes operating over at least 150 years, and the outcome of two more rapid, qualitative organizational transformations separated by a century.

This essay grapples with the conceptualization of several key terms that are necessary for our understanding of the regional presence of Chaco. Following a consideration of the notion of Chaco, comments are focused on: (1) Chacoan architectural complexes; (2) great house function; (3) settlement clusters and Chacoan communities; and (4) the regional integration of Chaco. Key variables that have been proposed as relevant to the identification of Chacoan communities are examined in some detail and appeals are made to clarify the usage of several terms, including great house, Chaco era, and community. It is argued that an understanding of the archaeological manifestations of Chaco outside Chaco Canyon will require much more systematic survey at a spatial scale sufficient to detect multiple levels of settlement clustering and that more detailed studies of the interactions among Chacoan architectural complexes and their associated residential settlements will provide key insights into the nature of wha...

Corruccini questions our identification of kin group-based cemeteries and our inference of an ascriptive component of leadership at Hawikku based on the presumed use of flawed sex determinations, statistical problems, and inattention to potential gender-based differences in morphological similarity. We address each of these topics and present new evidence to support our contention that cemeteries at Hawikku were kin based.

A long-standing debate in Amazonian archaeology is whether large sites represent contemporaneous communities or palimpsests accrued through multiple reoccupations. Quantitative ceramic seriation has been used to support the latter view. This argument is evaluated in terms of its statistical basis and its assumptions about sources of ceramic variability. On the basis of this evaluation, we conclude that the case for reoccupation, based on seriation, is unconvincing.

Archaeologists, especially those doing regional surveys, generally assume that there is a correlation between the areal extent of a habitation site and the number of people living at that site. This paper uses a oombination of archaeological and historical data from the Peruvian Andes to examine this assumption. We find that, in this case, only a weak correlation holds between these two factors. However, a consideration of site function and topography may render the apparent ambiguities understandable. Entre los arqueologos, particularmente los que realizan prospecciones regionales, se presume generalmente que existe una correlaci6n entre el area de un sitio habitacional y el ntmero de personas que vivieron en el sitio. Este articulo utiliza una combinaci6n de datos arqueol6gicos e hist6ricos de los Andes peruanos para evaluar este supuesto. Resulta que, en este caso, solo se mantiene una correlaci6n muy pobre entre estos dosfactores. Sin embargo, si tomamos en cuenta lafunci6n del sitio y la topografia, las ambiguedades aparentes podrian resultar mads comprensibles.

Malgre le role central de la parente dans les arguments anthropologiques, les recherches archeologiques recentes destinees a detecter les liens de parente sont particulierement rares. Dans cet article, la distribution de l'âge et du sexe et les traits morphologiques dentaires refletant une affinite genetique sont employes pour demontrer que des groupes familiaux specifiques etaient inhumes dans des cimetieres de l'ancien habitat Zuni d'Hawikku (Nouveau Mexique). Les groupes de parents identifies permettent d'etudier la structure politique d'Hawikku. Les resultats montrent que les chefs de la communaute, identifies grâce au traitement et aux offrandes funeraires, etaient selectionnes dans un petit nombre de groupes familiaux

The century following the collapse of Chaco is often viewed as a time of cultural backsliding. However, imposing sites with Chaco-inspired public architecture provide evidence of large communities, dating between A.D. 1200 and 1275, that laid the organizational foundations of well-known Pueblo IV towns. This article reports on excavations at one such Zuni-area settlement, the Hinkson site. In this site, 32 residential room blocks surround a great house complex that includes an unroofed, oversize great kiva, a nazha, and roads. The Hinkson site appears to be the center of a 250 square kilometer community with 70 room blocks and nearly 900 rooms. Recognition of these multi-room block communities with public architecture permits a reformulation of current concepts of post-Chacoan, Anasazi social integration and provides a more plausible bridge between the Chacoan and Pueblo IV periods.

Settlement-pattern studies are plagued by the problem of analyzing site distribution maps for time periods during which not all sites are contemporaneous. In a key insight, Dewar (1991) used counts of sites occupied at the beginning and end of a period to estimate, through simulation, the number of simultaneously occupied sites. While Dewar's treatment is an important contribution, drawbacks to his method are identified and remedies proposed. First, an equation that obviates the need for the simulation is provided. It is then shown that Dewar's method fails to take into account those sites that are both established and abandoned during the period. Finally, this problem is remedied through a modification of the equation that incorporates the single-period sites in the estimate of the number of contemporaneous sites. Application to Valley of Mexico settlement data suggests larger numbers of simultaneously occupied sites and shorter site use spans than were obtained by Dewar.

The value of "diversity" in social and ecological systems is frequently asserted in academic and policy literature. Diversity is thought to enhance the resilience of social-ecological systems to varied and potentially uncertain future conditions. Yet there are trade-offs; diversity in ecological and social domains has costs as well as benefits. In this paper, we examine social diversity, specifically its costs and benefits in terms of decision making in middle range or tribal societies, using archaeological evidence spanning seven centuries from four regions of the U.S. Southwest. In these nonstate societies, social diversity may detract from the capacity for collective action. We ask whether as population density increases, making collective action increasingly difficult, social diversity declines. Further, we trace the cases of low diversity and high population density across our long-temporal sequences to see how they associate with the most dramatic transformations. This latter analysis is inspired by the claim in resilience literature that reduction of diversity may contribute to reduction in resilience to varied conditions. Using archaeological data, we examine social diversity and conformity through the material culture (pottery styles) of past societies. Our research contributes to an enhanced understanding of how population density may limit social diversity and suggests the role that this association may play in some contexts of dramatic social transformation.

"What relationships can be understood between resilience and vulnerability in social-ecological systems? In particular, what vulnerabilities are exacerbated or ameliorated by different sets of social practices associated with water management? These questions have been examined primarily through the study of contemporary or recent historic cases. Archaeology extends scientific observation beyond all social memory and can thus illuminate interactions occurring over centuries or millennia. We examined trade-offs of resilience and vulnerability in the changing social, technological, and environmental contexts of three long-term, pre-Hispanic sequences in the U.S. Southwest: the Mimbres area in southwestern New Mexico (AD 650???1450), the Zuni area in northern New Mexico (AD 850???1540), and the Hohokam area in central Arizona (AD 700???1450). In all three arid landscapes, people relied on agricultural systems that depended on physical and social infrastructure that diverted adequate water to agricultural soils. However, investments in infrastructure varied across the cases, as did local environmental conditions. Zuni farming employed a variety of small-scale water control strategies, including centuries of reliance on small runoff agricultural systems; Mimbres fields were primarily watered by small-scale canals feeding floodplain fields; and the Hohokam area had the largest canal system in pre-Hispanic North America. The cases also vary in their historical trajectories: at Zuni, population and resource use remained comparatively stable over centuries, extending into the historic period; in the Mimbres and Hohokam areas, there were major demographic and environmental transformations. Comparisons across these cases thus allow an understanding of factors that promote vulnerability and influence resilience in specific contexts."