Maize agriculture was practiced in the US Southwest slightly before 2000 BC, but had a negligible impact on population growth rates until it was coupled with other innovations in subsistence and social practice. These include the development or introduction of more productive landraces; the ability to successfully cultivate maize under a greater variety of conditions, with dry farming especially important; the addition of beans, squash, and eventually turkey to the diet; and what we infer to be the remapping of exchange networks and the development of efficient exchange strategies in first-millennium-AD villages. Our tabulations of the P(5–19) proportion emphasize the heartlands of the Chaco and Mesa Verde Anasazi (prehispanic Pueblo) populations. We find that this measure is somewhat affected by warfare in our region. Nevertheless, there is a strong identifiable Neolithic Demographic Transition signal in the US Southwest in the mid-first-millennium AD in most subregions, visible a few hundred years after the introduction of well-fired ceramic containers, and more or less contemporaneous with the first appearance of villages.
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Kohler, T.A., Glaude, M. (2008). The Nature and Timing of the Neolithic Demographic Transition in the North American Southwest. In: Bocquet-Appel, JP., Bar-Yosef, O. (eds) The Neolithic Demographic Transition and its Consequences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8539-0_5
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