This week we ask archaeologist and author David E. Stuart some questions about his groundbreaking book Anasazi America: Seventeen Centuries on the Road from Center Place, which has given many people interested in New Mexico and in Pueblo culture a way to think about the past and about its applications to the future.
New Mexico Mercury: How does your thesis about “power and efficiency” in early Pueblo society play out in the modern world beyond the Pueblo universe.
David Stuart: All societies through time balance "power", that is episodes characterized by rapid energy consumption and outputs, with "efficiency", or periods of diminished rates of energy consumption and conservation or careful balancing of outputs versus inputs. The human body does this daily in patterns of sleep (relatively efficient) and waking activity (higher rates of energy flow, raised body temperature, etc.). In the modern world one can think of the U.S. as a quintessential powerful society--complex, fast paced and which rapidly consumes stunning quantities of energy measureable in calories, Kcal. or gig calories, and wastes equally stunning quantities of it.
Last year, if I recall correctly, we wasted billions of pounds of food. And our "modern" beef production is such that the half-pound of steak you eat in a restaurant "cost" nearly a hundred calories for each calorie you metabolize into fat or muscle. This is not sustainable....to grasp this one has merely to contemplate contemporary Amish farming communities which live "off the grid" using horses and hand labor to produce food. The Amish are far more efficient, using primarily 150 year old technology. Their culture is less complex, far slower to change, tightly integrated, and much less likely to suffer in a major economic downturn or nationwide electrical or internet crisis. Power phases in a society create growth, complexity, and can provide effective competitive behavior (We are "The number ONE world power,” some crow endlessly). The question for such a society in modern times is, given more than 7 billion humans on this planet, "how do you expect to sustain this?"
NMM: Has your power and efficiency model caught on with other archaeologists as a research paradigm?
DS: Not really, most archaeologists are still invested in very particularistic explanations focusing on material culture, architecture and regional dynamics. Though many are extraordinarily talented at such analyses, few have studied ecology, agronomy, demography and climate in enough detail to put their better regional studies into modern analytical perspectives. So, as wonderful to read as many archaeological works are, few practitioners are interested in the level of analysis I champion. It’s another story, though, among a number of general anthropologists/ethnologists(some of whom refer to themselves as specializing in "cultural energetics) and those from other fields in the natural sciences. Thus, the first edition of Anasazi America was reviewed in the journal "Science" before it attracted much attention in archaeology.
NMM: Why do you think post Chacoan Pueblo people never made the same “power” mistakes as their ancestors had at Chaco?
DS: A combination of factors are likely. First, the magnitude of the failure in the 1100's CE/AD was profound enough to refashion values which favored smaller scale, more sustainable and, frankly more self-sufficient local communities. Second, climate did not cooperate with enough year to year predictability to stimulate going back to a Chacoan regional model in the 1200's and 1300's CE/AD, worse yet it also got cooler, which shortened growing seasons. Third, so much resource conflict took place in the period from 1150-1250 CE/AD that hunkering down in smaller, defensive communities at higher altitude (Mesa Verde and Bandelier Nt. Monument are examples) became the norm and those communities had neither the access to vast lower elevation farmlands as did the Chacoans, nor the massive regional labor pools of the Chacoan high period. So continuing to maintain roads, build great houses, etc., simply was not doable.
NMM: What’s to be learned from the Pueblo experience by modern urban dwellers in the arid American Southwest?
DS: Quite a lot. How to create the basic elements of fairly stable and well-integrated communities in the 1300's to about 1600 is one lesson. Some of that is discussed in the new edition of Anasazi America, and also in a book I published in 2010 titled Pueblo Peoples on the Pajarito Plateau: Archaeology and Efficiency, where I lay out the transformation to efficiency based society among the Pajarito peoples and their descendants, who still maintain the communities we think of as the contemporary world. Those communities survived because of integrating social behaviors, a fetish for efficiency, and land use/holding patterns which respected the regional environment's natural attributes. Those attributes, we all know, were not generous with regard to water.
NMM: How does your power and efficiency analysis appear to students and young thinkers and activists as they face the prospects of climate change in their lifetimes?
DS: The advanced undergrads I've taught at UNM, especially over the last 25 of my 40 odd teaching years, deeply engage these ideas. They see them as compelling. They understand cycles of power and efficiency once the elements are explained.
A few years ago I began including an ongoing research them in my classes, titled "finding the calories", as a way to make prehistoric life tangible and open up what my colleagues describe to more levels of analysis. We costed out the calories it took for an extended family of farmer/foragers to sustain themselves at 250 and carried them forward though the costs of pregnancies (300 extra calories a day for each pregnant female; 500 more calories a day if the baby is born and she can nurse it. We computed corn yields per acre over an 800 year span, and computed the needed acreage to accommodate expanding families, by factoring in the average caloric yield of a near of prehistoric corn--70calories. Many of those results are published in this edition of the book in "featured research" sections identifying the student authors.
As debates about the quality of New Mexico undergrads rage in the pages of local newspapers, these student's work needs to be considered.
Anasazi America is available at bookstores or directly from the University of New Mexico Press at unmpress.com or 800.249.7737.
Responses to “Five Questions with New Mexico Authors - David E. Stuart”