Archaeologists are adept at reconstructing the parameters of past natural environments and often argue for climatic changes or ecosystem shifts to explain ancient changes in land use, including population movement, and depopulation. Ancient social environments are harder to reconstruct, and we have a much poorer grasp of how the social environment affects where and how people live. One sort of social behavior that is often visible archaeologically is violence: raiding and warfare. Using ethnohistoric cases, Dr. Cameron identifies “landscapes of predation” created by intense social violence. She will describe the archaeological signatures that violence produces and illustrate the utility of this concept with examples from the American Southwest and Southeast. 

About the speaker: Dr. Catherine M. Cameron is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. She works in the northern part of the American Southwest, focusing especially on the Chaco and post-Chaco eras (AD 900–1300).