Decline and Dissolution of the Chacoan World
Lecture by David Stuart, SAR Interim President and Senior Scholar, September 18, 2013
Dynamic changes in patterns of energy use and acquisition over nine centuries were required in order for Ancestral Puebloans to become Chacoans. Until Stuart and his students at the University of New Mexico created the multiyear "Finding the Calories" project, few scholars knew precisely how Puebloan farmers achieved many-fold increases in population growth, construction rates, and the expansion of regional trading networks to create the full-blown Chacoan society of the eleventh century CE. In this first public lecture on their complete findings, Stuart reports the basic elements of nine centuries of change and points out their relevance to contemporary American society.