Monger said the NMSU team’s goals include satisfying their basic human curiosity to see how the different cultures lived and learning how these people were affected by climate change. The evidence they find will also help them compare global warming today to global warming of the past and determine how the New Mexico landscape responded to those changes. He said they have also found large amounts of calcium carbonate “caliche” in the soil and want to determine whether it came from the atmosphere or soil microorganisms.

“To gauge what we are looking at now, we need to understand the past,” Monger said. “Are we in a period of warming? Well, perhaps. If we are, how much warming is it compared to what’s happened naturally? We need to understand the natural background level of climate change in order to understand current climate change.”

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