Traits, such as crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM), enable economically important species such as those in the Agave genus adapt to drought and high temperatures. Consequently, alternative crops need to be sought out that adapt well to heat and drought and are productive despite limited access to water. These new trading routes and exchange systems were documented by the Spanish in the period after AD 1534.Ĭultivation of C 3 and C 4 crops in semi-arid regions will be severely constrained as global temperatures rise. It describes some potential causes for the collapse of this potential network, and how southwest trade routes were then re-established further southwards after the expansion of bison herds onto the southern plains after ~AD 1350. This paper uses comparative ethnology and historic literature on wildlife abundance, hide hunting, and trade networks to describe how Chaco Canyon could have functioned as an exchange center along the route until ~AD 1150. If so, Chaco Canyon and its amazing array of engineered buildings and roads lay right along a “least cost route”, and are possibly linked with the movement and trade of hides. It is likely that a hide trade route existed between these areas of supply and demand. In the southwest, for the prehistoric period ~AD 500 to ~1200, one of the strongest gradients between hide supply and demand lay between the southwestern edge of heavily used bison range, then on the central plains north of the Arkansas River near modern-day Denver, Colorado, and the Hohokam agricultural lands in the modern-day Phoenix basin of Arizona. Many of these extant Native American hide trading routes were tapped by the Spanish, French, and British after ~AD 1500 to provide hides to the European market.

In North America, numerous prehistoric and historic trade routes existed to move hides from areas of high supply (e.g., Great Plains bison herds) to areas of high human density and demand for hides, but with low supply (e.g., western salmon-bearing rivers, early agricultural zones in the southwest and along the Mississippi River). Human processing of animal hides is an ancient technology that provided a wide array of products useful for clothing, shelter, transportation, warfare, and ceremonies.

Human food use has expanded the distribution of many plant species in the Sonoran Desert. We also found that succulence and annual growth interacted with food usage to increase range filling. We found that food plants fill more of their potential geographical ranges than their unused congeners. We used ethnobotanical data and data from large botanical ecoinformatics databases to estimate realized (dispersal‐ and climate‐constrained) and potential (climate‐constrained) ranges for food plants and their used and unused congeners. The Sonoran Desert of south‐western North America. We also hypothesized that key ecological traits could predispose a species to occupy more of its potential climatic geographical range and be selected by humans for food. We hypothesized that human‐mediated dispersal has resulted in food plants occupying more of their potential geographical range. However, past human use of species for food might also have influenced distributions. Climate is usually regarded as the main determinant of plant species distributions.

Hohokam location