Looming southwest Mega-drought comparable to one that destroyed Ancestral Pueblo culture

mega-drought” throughout the Southwest in this century, comparable to that which destroyed the Ancestral Pueblo culture.

Ancestral Pueblo people abandoned their communities by about ad 1300, the time that marks the beginning of the fourth Pueblo period. It is believed that a convergence of cultural and environmental factors caused this to occur. The Great Drought (1276–99) probably caused massive crop failure; rainfall continued to be sparse and unpredictable until approximately 1450. At the same time, and perhaps in relation to the Great Drought’s impact on the availability of wild foods, conflicts increased between the Ancestral Pueblo and ancestral Navajo and Apache groups. During the Pueblo IV period, the Ancestral Pueblo moved to the south and the east, building new communities in places where gravity-based irrigation works could be built, including the White Mountains of what is now Arizona, as well as the Rio Grande valley. Although some new villages were even larger than those of Pueblo III, they tended to be cruder in layout and construction than their earlier counterparts; stone was used less often, and in some cases construction materials consisted wholly of adobe. The production of fine pottery continued to flourish and develop, however, as did weaving.

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 Ancestral Pueblo culture.