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PUEBLOAN AGRICULTURE IN THE FOUR CORNERS AREA: ANSWERS TO AN ENIGMA?

Fred Nials

The Four Corners area is the subject of some of the most intense archaeological and paleoenvironmental investigations in the U.S. Despite this, many questions remain concerning Puebloan agriculture and subsistence. Maize is a near-ubiquitous find in Puebloan sites in the area, but most of the region is, at best, marginal for dryland farming. Until recently the location and nature of where crops were grown were largely a matter of speculation. The availability of LiDAR imagery in 2020 has allowed the identification of more than 60 mi2 of distinctive berm-and-swale agricultural landscapes in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. These archaeological landscapes demonstrate an intimate knowledge of water ecology and provided a sophisticated means of moisture management using an estimated 3,200 miles of ridges (berms) about 3½ feet high and 7 feet wide. Additional discoveries by ourselves and other investigators include more than 500 miles of Chacoan era (?) roads and more than 280 circular “racetracks.”

Fred Nials was raised in rural eastern New Mexico. Although a geologist by training, he has done geoarchaeological research on over 5,000 archaeological sites ranging in age from Paleoindian to Historic in North and South America and the Mediterranean area, and taught at universities in New Mexico, Washington, and Nevada for 28 years. He specializes in the stratigraphy of archaeological sites, prehistoric agricultural technology, and has done pioneering work on aeolian and alluvial chronologies in the western U.S. and South America.

He participated in early definitive studies of ancestral Puebloan Chacoan roads. He participated in one of the earliest large-scale studies of prehistoric irrigation in coastal South America, and co-authored one of the first papers relating the effects of prehistoric El Niño events to the South American archaeological record. He participated in the earliest comprehensive study of the Hohokam canal system in the Phoenix Basin, analyzed some of the oldest yet-known prehistoric canals in the contiguous U.S., and was part of a team that retrodicted the annual flow of the Salt and Gila Rivers since 577 A.D. He helped develop a system for location and identification of buried prehistoric fields in southern Arizona that resulted in locating more than 900 individual fields, some of which were more

7:30 PM, Tuesday, June 16, 2026

 Albuquerque Museum of Art and History 

2000 Mountain Road NW