Settlement Pattern

The settlement pattern makes clear why good stratigraphy was obtained in what is normally a difficult context, that of a stratified series of villages. The reason is that, once abandoned, structures were never disturbed. Burials within the structures were also never drastically disturbed; abandoned houses were abandoned household cemeteries.

Figure 5 Shows the central core of the structures from our virtual reality representation of Paloma, which can be visited at a web site, Http://coas. missouri. edu, and hereafter, Paloma World. These more structures show a settlement pattern of agglutinated structures that never intrude upon earlier ones. Other structures, presumably a part of other complete clusters, were also encountered.

Vradenburg and his associates found an interesting shift in total house floor area over time. Using a figure of 9.4 m2 of roofed area per person and a 50-year maximum life for a house suggested an average population of about 60 between 6500 and 5300 BP, the time of the site-wide occupation of level #400. Using the same procedures, we calculated a population of about 450 in level #300, the level whose abundant grass suggests maximum moisture. We estimate the lower bound for #200 as about 200 inhabitants who, over time, moved to the nearby river valley. Not surprisingly, palaeodemographic study of the human remains showed a decrease in growth rate in the final occupation at Paloma even though the actual local population of fog oasis and river valley was expanding. Other evidence of sedentism includes the more than 400 storage pits, many containing plant or animal food. For example, one grass-lined pit was full of anchovies with heads removed; others contained ground anchovies, and many contained stored plant materials, all suggesting a sedentary life dependent upon stored foods (see Figure 4).