November
21
/ 2020
Recent research has shown that the ancient Ancestral Puebloans culture, in what is today New Mexico, burned controlled fires in volcanic ice melt lava tubes to survive major droughts. El Malpais, or the “bad lands,” was the name Spanish explorers gave to the harsh arid landscapes of modern-day western New Mexico. The Ancestral Puebloans were an ancient Native American culture that lived in the present-day Four Corners region of the United States beginning from around 8,000 BC. It is known they developed entire architecture and administrative systems, but only now have their “water survival” strategies been revealed. The team of geoscientific researchers was led by the University of South Florida, collaborating with the National Park Service, the University of Minnesota
