All day
The Village Ecodynamics Project seeks to understand ancient Pueblo peoples in their social and environmental contexts, a task that benefits from close collaboration among researchers from diverse disciplines. Alongside archaeology, computer science, ecology and geology, biomolecular science and economics play important roles. In the long run we hope that projects such as this will help the social sciences to overcome their historic isolation from biology, the earth sciences, and mathematics.
In the shorter term our agent-based models provide mechanisms for integrating insights from paleoclimatology, anthropology, and ecology, and provide expectations against which we can compare the always-surprising richness and variability of the actual historical contexts that we study in southwestern Colorado and north-central New Mexico.