Vultures carve lazy circles in the sky as a stream of tourists marches down a walkway into Colorado’s Spruce Canyon. Watching their steps, the visitors file along a series of switchbacks leading to one of the more improbable villages in North America — a warren of living quarters, storage rooms, defensive towers and ceremonial spaces all tucked into a large cleft in the face of a cliff.
All together, nearly 30,000 people disappeared from this area between the mid-1200s and 1285, making it one of the greatest vanishing acts documented in human history.
Insights into that shift are emerging thanks to a major interdisciplinary effort called the Village Ecodynamics Project (VEP), which launched in 2002. Funded by the US National Science Foundation, the nearly US$2.5-million initiative is assessing how social and environmental factors influenced the populations of prehistoric Pueblo farmers from about 600 to 1300, says Tim Kohler, the VEP’s principal investigator and an archaeologist at Washington State University in Pullman.