Anthropologists at Washington State University have linked the self-degradation and subsequent extinction of the Pueblo civilization to the patterns of behavior adopted in ancient society. Drought periods, which lasted up to ten years, made it impossible for the Indians to grow crops (primarily corn). The pueblo problem was solved not by the creation of irrigation systems, as in ancient China and Babylon, but by migration to other regions. The research is published in Science Advances.
The Pueblo society, as study co-author Tim Kohler of Washington State University noted, was "intertwined with a web of ceremony and ritual that requires belief in the supernatural" to ensure abundant rainfall and good harvests. The dynamics of the development of Indians during the drought was predictable: a socio-economic crisis, a surge in violence, religious disappointment (or guilt), and subsequent migration to territories with a more favorable climate.
Scientists have discovered three major migrations of the Pueblo people from their original territories. Archaeologists have previously described only one such migration. The first migration took place in the era of basket makers III between 600 and 700 and ended with a drought, after which the era of pueblo I began, during which the practice of storing corn in underground chambers was replaced by storing them indoors above the ground.
Scientists believe the economic shift is driven by the shift from unrestricted to controlled food intake. The era ended in about 890 with a drought. Pueblo II (1035-1145) was marked by the construction of large buildings - the largest structures in the history of pre-Columbian North America (in the Chaco Canyon area). Wood for roofs was transported over distances of up to one hundred kilometers, which required a high level of coordination and a developed hierarchical organization of society.
Pueblo III reached its heyday by 1250, after which the longest and most destructive drought for the Indians began (it was she who was previously known to scientists). This era was characterized by the emergence of social distance in the Pueblo society, which was replaced in the Pueblo IV culture by a more equitable distribution of resources (the era is characterized by premises with equal access to common and ceremonial territories).
In the course of the study, archaeologists analyzed data from more than a thousand archaeological sites and studied more than 30 thousand data of ring sections of tree trunks from the Four Corners region in the southwestern United States, which occupies the territory of the southwest of Colorado, northwest of New Mexico, northeast Arizona and southeast Utah. On a common stretch of the four-state border, there is the Four Corners Monument, after which the territory got its name. Indians still occupy a significant proportion of the population of the Four Corners. Scientists put forward many assumptions about the causes of migration and the subsequent disappearance of civilizations in this region. The work of American anthropologists makes it possible to draw conclusions about the importance of climatic, religious and scientific factors for the economic development of society.