Geoscientists discover Ancestral Puebloans survived from ice melt in New Mexico lava tubes

A lava tube in the El Malpais National Monument yields centuries-old insights of survival in the face of harsh climate change
Date:
November 18, 2020
Source:
University of South Florida (USF Innovation)
Summary:
New study explains how Ancestral Puebloans survived devastating droughts by traveling deep into the caves of New Mexico to melt ancient ice as a water resource.


For more than 10,000 years, the people who lived on the arid landscape of modern-day western New Mexico were renowned for their complex societies, unique architecture and early economic and political systems. But surviving in what Spanish explorers would later name El Malpais, or the "bad lands," required ingenuity now being explained for the first time by an international geosciences team led by the University of South Florida.

Exploring an ice-laden lava tube of the El Malpais National Monument and using precisely radiocarbon- dated charcoal found preserved deep in an ice deposit in a lava tube, USF geosciences Professor Bogdan Onac and his team discovered that Ancestral Puebloans survived devastating droughts by traveling deep into the caves to melt ancient ice as a water resource.

Dating back as far as AD 150 to 950, the water gatherers left behind charred material in the cave indicating they started small fires to melt the ice to collect as drinking water or perhaps for religious rituals. Working in collaboration with colleagues from the National Park Service, the University of Minnesota and a research institute from Romania, the team published its discovery in Scientific Reports.

The droughts are believed to have influenced settlement and subsistence strategies, agricultural intensification, demographic trends and migration of the complex Ancestral Puebloan societies that once inhabited the American Southwest. Researchers claim the discovery from ice deposits presents "unambiguous evidence" of five drought events that impacted Ancestral Puebloan society during those centuries.

More:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201118080741.htm



Extremely interesting landscape you may want to scan, at google images, El Malpais National Monument, New Mexico:

https://tinyurl.com/yyzftnv3