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The droughts are believed to have influenced settlement and subsistence strategies, agricultural intensification, demographic trends, and migration of the complex Ancestral Puebloans societies that once inhabited the American Southwest. Using precisely radiocarbon dated charcoal from an ice deposit preserved in a lava tube from El Malpais National Monument of New Mexico, we conclude that the population in the region used melted ice for drinking as early as 2000 years ago. The need of constant domestic water supply, especially during major drought events, forced Ancestral Puebloans people to venture into lava tubes and look for ice. Water availability in an already harsh environment may have influenced migrations across the landscape and caused repetitive depopulation‐repopulation of some settlement locations. 

The droughts are believed to have influenced settlement and subsistence strategies, agricultural intensification, demographic trends, and migration of the complex Ancestral Puebloans societies that once inhabited the American Southwest. Using precisely radiocarbon dated charcoal from an ice deposit preserved in a lava tube from El Malpais National Monument of New Mexico, we conclude that the population in the region used melted ice for drinking as early as 2000 years ago. The need of constant domestic water supply, especially during major drought events, forced Ancestral Puebloans people to venture into lava tubes and look for ice. Water availability in an already harsh environment may have influenced migrations across the landscape and caused repetitive depopulation‐repopulation of some settlement locations. 

Abstract Water availability for Native Americans in the southwestern United States during periods of prolonged droughts is poorly understood as regional hydroclimate records are scant or contradicting. Here, we show that radiocarbon-dated charcoal recovered from an ice deposit accumulated in Cave 29, western New Mexico, provide unambiguous evidence for five drought events that impacted the Ancestral Puebloan society between ~ AD 150 and 950. The presence of abundant charred material in this cave indicates that they periodically obtained drinking water by using fire to melt cave ice, and sheds light on one of many human–environment interactions in the Southwest in a context when climate change forced growing Ancestral Puebloan populations to exploit water resources in unexpected locations. The melting of cave ice under current climate conditions is both uncovering and threatening a fragile source of paleoenvironmental and archaeological evidence of human adaptations to a seemingly marginal environment.