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Periods of acute climate stress – the convergence of low subsistence yields due to poor climate conditions and ineffective buffering strategies due to climate variability – critically reduces peoples' ability to subsist and mitigate food shortages, thereby creating conditions that could result in profound social change. Here, paleoclimate reconstructions are used to identify periods of acute stress at three large Ancestral Pueblo villages in the US Southwest. These periods are examined in relation to occupation histories at each village showing that in certain instances, acute climate stress played a primary role in people's decisions to leave communities. However, not all of the communities reacted to stress in the same way indicating that distinct patterns of climate and social context played an important role in influencing how acute climate stress was experienced by different groups. Results from this study highlight the importance of community‐specific histories when considering the impact of climate stress on past people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes several roads with apparent associations with the Bluff Great House site (42Sa22674) in southeastern Utah. These descriptions underscore the similarity of these features with other such features in the northern Southwest, including roads and road-related features in the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico. The differing configurations and contexts of the Bluff Great House roads suggest opportunities to explore community organization and identity, Puebloan cosmology, and emergence narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]