A Scale Model of Seven Hundred Years of Farming Settlements in Southwestern Colorado

Abstract:

“The history of life,” writes evolutionary biologist Leo Buss, “is a history of the elaboration of new self-replicating entities by the self-replicating entities contained within them. Self-replicating molecules created selfreplicating complexes, such complexes created (or became incorporated into) cells, cells obtained organelles, and cellular complexes gave rise to multicellular individuals. At each transition—at each stage in the history of life in which a new self-replicating unit arose—the rules regarding the operation of natural selection changed utterly” (1987:viii).In this chapter, we review the demographic and settlement history of a portion of the central Mesa Verde region of southwestern Colorado (USA) in the context of three models: the “Neolithic Demographic Transition” of Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel (2002), a model developed by ecologist Peter Turchin that links sociopolitical instability with population size, and the rank-size relationship developed by Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf. These are not competing models but different windows into ancient Pueblo society, and we learn a little from each about life in the early farming villages found in the central Mesa Verde region between AD 600 and 1300.