大学共同利用機関法人　人間文化研究機構　総合地球環境学研究所

In this talk I review the main accomplishments of the Village Ecodynamics Project（VEP）. The VEP studied changes in population size and aggregation in two large areas of the US Southwest, with unusual attention to their environmental setting and how both human settlement and climatic variability changed the environment over the course of the occupation. I describe our use of computer simulation models and more traditional inferential approaches, and the role played by each in our main results. A problem that emerged during the research was an unanticipated relationship between maize production, violence, and household-level wealth inequality in our northern research area (the central Mesa Verde region). I describe our attempts to disentangle the casual relationships among these three variables.