 Andrew Duff theorizes that Zuñi Salt Lake was a special site for the
community that lived in the Cox Ranch village from A.D. 1050 to 1150
and that the people likely traded salt for other goods with neighboring
communities.
Virtual villages
A large chunk of the Southwest can be found in Tim Kohler’s
College Hall laboratory in Pullman. It’s reflected on computer
screens and stored in databases. And it grows by the day, as Kohler
and his students busily collect centuries of information.
Environment, rainfall, geography, deer populations, plants and
trees, mortality rates, and signs of human occupation all factor
into a virtual Anasazi world.
Kohler wants to know why the people built their villages where
and when they did. He’s looking at 1,800 square miles northwest of
Mesa Verde, land known to have supported a high concentration of
villages. Breaking the area down into 200-square-meter cells,
Kohler and his students input data for households built near water,
good farmland, and wood for fuel. The program even considers the
degradation of the soil after years of crops, the deforestation of
an area for firewood, and trade and gift-giving practices.
Kohler conducts his work in close connection with the real-life
archaeology at Crow Canyon. “They’re our reality check,” he says.
“We build our models and play off our models against their
findings.”
Agent-based modeling is not a big niche in archaeology—it never
has been, says Kohler. But an ever-increasing amount of data and
improved technology allow him and his graduate students to focus on
very specific areas, with the idea of gaining an understanding of
how communities developed.
His collaboration with another archaeologist and a computer
science expert was featured in a Scientific American
magazine article last summer. Titled “Simulating Ancient
Societies,” the piece suggests that something besides, or in
addition to, environmental issues caused the Anasazi to leave.
The beauty of focusing on the Southwest is that there is so much
data available, both archaeological and environmental, to factor
into and check against the computer simulations, says Kohler.
Though the simulations seem to mirror the actual population
location and growth up to the 1200s, it doesn’t reflect the
dramatic depopulation late in that century. There’s more to be
done.
“Work like this is really cumulative,” says Kohler. His research
builds on the research of others going back more than 100 years.
“This gives us a way to put the empirical findings into context,”
he says. In the long run, “I think we’ll debunk some theories.”
Recognizing the value in simulating the lives and environments
of civilizations, the National Science Foundation has provided
Kohler and his colleagues a $1 million grant to support the
archaeology and computer work.
“The Southwest [because it contains so much information] is an
area in which ideas can be tested,” says Kohler. “It’s not as easy
elsewhere in the archaeological world.”
Too many people resort to describing the story of the Anasazi as
a great mystery, says Lipe. But archaeologists, including those at
WSU, have learned a lot about the past in this region, and much of
it is more interesting and surprising than fiction.
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