Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Jazwa. Kyle Jazwa. Stephen Collins-Elliott.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ideal Free and Ideal Despotic Distribution (IFD/IDD) models have become increasingly popular in the archaeological and anthropological literature because of their flexibility to be applied at a variety of geographic scales. With some exceptions, however, most of the applications of the models...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elic Weitzel. Brian Codding. Stephen B. Carmody. David Zeanah.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Much recent research has emphasized the importance of both within-group cooperation and between-group competition in the human past. We hypothesize that the shift from foraging to food production in Eastern North America provided novel ecological conditions which impacted human sociality in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Vernon. Peter Yaworsky. Brian Codding.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological applications of ideal distribution models have advanced beyond the study of straightforward settlement decisions to address a variety of important but difficult anthropological questions. To aid in these investigations, we demonstrate a method for (i) decomposing habitat...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Plekhov. Evan Levine.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the concept of suitability as a guiding parameter for applications of the Ideal Free/Despotic Distribution (IFD/IDD) in cases of mixed pastoral and agricultural economies. We briefly review recent archaeological survey data and research from Central Asia to contextualize how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Harvey.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fifty years after their introduction, ideal distribution models have recently contributed to our understanding of numerous behavioral processes. In this paper, I argue these models hold the potential to increase our understanding of a broader suite of behaviors including, but not limited to,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D. Shane Miller. Stephen B. Carmody.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We use the Ideal Free Distribution from Behavioral Ecology as a null model to interpret the distribution of previously recorded archaeological sites in the Tennessee and Duck River Valleys in central Tennessee from the appearance of Clovis sites in the terminal Pleistocene though the Early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Magargal.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In desert environments resources are typically distributed heterogeneously. This variability required prehistoric humans to evaluate trade-offs over accessing spatially distinct patches. A potentially important and largely unexplored resource in these trade-offs is firewood. This work examines...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Farquhar.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents a research design to investigate the role of foragers in the evolution of pastoralism in Mongolia’s desert-steppe. Past efforts to understand the origins of herding have been stymied by the "steppe and sown" dichotomy that perpetuates long held stereotypes of farmers and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalie Munro. Elic Weitzel.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using predictions derived from the ideal free distribution, we test the hypothesis that the forager to farmer transition in the southern Levant emerged from a context of increased population packing. By constructing population size estimates derived from radiocarbon date frequencies and modeling...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Hanna. Christina Giovas.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Building on the Caribbean-wide models presented in Giovas and Fitzpatrick (2014) and predictive models recently synthesized for Grenada, this study focuses on a fine-grained analysis of environmental and cultural factors affecting settlement locations in the multi-island/archipelagic region from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arni Einarsson.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fences form distinct patterns and are a prominent feature of most cultural landscapes. Such patterns contain information about people and their relationship with the land. Archeological mapping of extensive Viking Age fences in Iceland highlights the need for a theory of fence construction. How...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frank Bayham.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Steve Fretwell served as a Visiting Maytag Professor at Arizona State University in the Biology Department in 1976-1977. He was a well-published, aspiring young evolutionary ecologist and taught several courses and seminars. I was a first-year graduate student in anthropology at that time and had...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert J. DiNapoli. Scott Fitzpatrick. Christina Giovas. Matthew Napolitano. Jessica Stone.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The settlement of the Caribbean Islands represents one of the most expansive and significant overwater population dispersal events in the history of the New World. While it is generally accepted that the Caribbean was settled from northern South America beginning in the mid-Holocene and involved...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Codding. Peter Yaworsky. Kenneth Blake Vernon. Jerry Spangler.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The specific ecological and social processes that structure the spread of agriculture into regions occupied by hunter-gatherers remain elusive. Drawing on ideal distribution models from population ecology, we evaluate whether the spread of agriculture in southern Utah was driven by free,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Loukas Barton.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ideal Free Distribution is a heuristic device used for understanding or explaining behavior as a product of density-dependent habitat selection. More recently, the model has been used to track the emergence of social and political complexity through change in the patterns of prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James O'Connell. Jim Allen.

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human populations in Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea) probably numbered in the tens of thousands, two orders of magnitude below the 3-4 million estimated at time of European contact. They were also more patchily distributed than simple hypotheses grounded in an ideal free distribution...