How did Native Americans in the American Southwest, where it regularly exceeds 100 degrees in the summer, stay cool?

by CatatonicTaterTot

My wife and I were discussing this over dinner. Obviously they didn't have things like modern insulation or central air conditioning...I've spent summers in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas and they are brutal. How did they deal with them? What methods did they use?

AlotOfReading

As you mentioned, the greater Southwest is famous for it's absolutely brutal summers, with temperatures reaching upwards of 120F (49C) in the summer, even in historic times. It goes without saying that no one would live there if there wasn't some way to mitigate that level of misery. Native Americans had many such strategies:

  1. Seasonal migrations

    • The Southwest is somewhat unique in the Americas in that sedentary and non-sedentary peoples lived in extremely close proximity. It was not uncommon for the more nomadic of these groups (e.g. the Navajo/Apache, Hia C-eḍ Oʼodham, and Utes) to migrate to cooler, high elevation camps during the hot summer months. It must be noted that many native animals do the same, following water and vegetation.

  2. Location, location, location

    • Many of the people living in the Southwest were farmers and almost half the annual rainfall in the Southwest comes from the summer monsoon seasons in June, July, and august. These are also the 3 hottest months of the year. Unfortunately, crops don't like heat and the major crops of the Southwest (corn, beans, and squash) are all less productive when temperatures exceed 100F. They are also less happy when temperatures drop below 50F. Consequently, you'll find that most of the major pueblo sites are at slightly higher elevations, where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold and most importantly, consistent year-to-year. There's been a number of studies exploring this phenomenon, especially in Northwestern New Mexico and Southwestern Colorado region under the VEP project.^1

  3. Native architecture

    • The sedentary peoples of the Southwest obviously lacked the freedom to move seasonally. Instead, they built large houses out of adobe. The size and incredibly large thermal mass of such structures kept the interior temperature within below about 87F. A modern house in Phoenix can get 4-7F cooler via AC, but it takes a $300 electric bill to do so.

  4. Avoiding the sun

    • Work schedules in the Southwest commonly avoided working during the hottest hours of the day, with much of the work focusing on early morning and late afternoon.

  5. Ethnobotany

    • Ethnobotanies of the southwest occasionally record various forms of sunscreen. One ethnobotanical record^2 documents a sunscreen made from the mustard family. I've never seen this topic actually explored anywhere and I've certainly never observed it used, so I can't comment on how common it actually was. Certainly worth noting though.

  6. They weren't dealing with global warming.

    • The average annual temperature in the greater southwest is already about 0.8C hotter than reconstructed averages for the historical southwest.^3 This is roughly the same difference as between a drought year and a normal year.

^1 Bocinsky, R. K., & Kohler, T. A. (2014). A 2,000-year reconstruction of the rain-fed maize agricultural niche in the US Southwest. Nature Communications, 5, 5618.

^2 Stevenson, M. C. (1915). Ethnobotany of the Zuni Indians (No. 1). US Government Printing Office. p. 50

^3 MacDonald, G. M. (2010). Water, climate change, and sustainability in the southwest. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(50), 21256-21262.