David E. Stuart – författare

Over twenty-five years ago, David Stuart began writing award-winning newspaper articles on regional archeology that appealed to general readers. These columns shared interesting, and usually little-known, facts and stories about the ancient people and places of the Southwest. By 1985, Stuart had penned enough columns to fill a book, ""Glimpses of the Ancient Southwest"", which has been unavailable for years. Now he has rewritten most of his original articles to include recently discovered information about Chaco Canyon, Bandelier, and Mesa Verde. Stuart's unusual perspective focuses on both the past and the present: 'Want to know why gasoline now costs $4.00 a gallon, and is headed higher, yet we have no instant solution? Chacoan, Roman, even Egyptian archeology all provide elemental answers'. ""The Ancient Southwest"" shares those with us.

At the height of their power in the late eleventh century, the Chaco Anasazi dominated a territory in the American Southwest larger than any European principality of the time. Developed over the course of centuries and thriving for over two hundred years, the Chacoans’ society collapsed dramatically in the twelfth century in a mere forty years.David E. Stuart incorporates extensive new research findings through ground breaking archaeology to explore the rise and fall of the Chaco Anasazi and how it parallels patterns throughout modern societies in this new edition. Adding new research findings on caloric flows in prehistoric times and investigating the evolutionary dynamics induced by these forces as well as exploring the consequences of an increasingly detached central Chacoan decision-making structure, Stuart argues that Chaco’s failure was a failure to adapt to the consequences of rapid growth—including problems with the misuse of farmland, malnutrition, loss of community, and inability to deal with climatic catastrophe.Have modern societies learned from the experience and fate of the Chaco Anasazi, or are we risking a similar cultural collapse?

A wholly new perspective on the importance of gardens and agriculture on the Chacoan world, establishing the female dominated gardeners as the basis of Chacoan culture. Author David E. Stuart digs beyond the standard archaeological examination of structures, tools, and rituals of the age to provide a more rounded view of this remarkable culture. An original look at the gardens and gardeners of the Chacoan World, internationally acclaimed ethno-anthropologist David E. Stuart’s Ancient Women Gardeners: Prelude to the Chacoan World explores the ecological, demographic, and human dynamics that led to Chaco’s rise and fall from its early beginnings in the 500s AD to its decline during the 1100s AD. The Chacoan system represents North America’s earliest form of an emergent urban ecology. From its outset, Chacoan farm nodes consisted of widely scattered clusters of gardens connected by roads, way stations, and district granaries. Chaco’s women gardeners fueled powerful growth that was eventually aborted as unforeseen dynamics barred the path to long-term sustainability. Stuart considers the intersection of population growth, agricultural yields, crop and soil possibilities, the caloric cost of labor, the corrosive role of pellagra, iron-deficiency anemia, the power of dietary protein in population dynamics, and the limitations imposed by early growth in the San Juan Basin—a land of poor soils, unpredictable rainfall, and rapidly declining wild vegetal foods and game. Focusing on the Chacoan landscape, farming techniques, and a world in which clusters of individual gardening families played a key role in creating an incipient urbanism in the Southwest, Stuart argues that without these accomplished gardening families and their agricultural innovations, there never would have been a “Chaco Phenomenon.”