We review a suite of agent-based models developed by the Village Ecodynamics Project
(VEP) to study ecological, economic, social, and political processes among prehispanic
Puebloan (“Anasazi”) populations in the Northern US Southwest in the context of a dynamic
natural environment. Collectively these models shed light on processes that include the
local intensification of turkey raising, the emergence of complex societies in this region, and
the complete depopulation of the Northern Southwest in the thirteenth-century AD …