The Over-Hunting of Deer in the VEP Simulation
This figure shows simulated deer and human populations in 16 runs of the VEP simulation. The dark lines that begin in the upper-left and decline to the lower-right are the deer populations (size indicated on the left axis); the lighter lines that begin in the lower-left and end in the upper-right are human populations (size indicated on the right axis). In all cases, human hunting reduces the deer population on the simulated landscape. VEP researchers use results like these to argue that ancestral Pueblo people intensified the raising and eating of domesticated turkeys to supplement deer for a source of protein in their diet as human populations grew and hunting reduced the number of deer on the landscape.

Graph by R. Kyle Bocinsky. Reproduced from Plate 9.2 in “How Hunting Changes the VEP World, and How the VEP World Changes Hunting,” by R. Kyle Bocinsky, Jason A. Cowan, Timothy A. Kohler, and C. David Johnson. In Emergence and Collapse of Early Villages: Models of Central Mesa Verde Archaeology, edited by Timothy A. Kohler and Mark D. Varien, pp. 145–152. © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press, Berkeley.

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