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

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In March 1969, Stephen Fretwell and Henry Lucas Jr. published "On Territorial Behavior and Other Factors Influencing Habitat Distribution in Birds." This paper described the theoretical models of the ideal free distribution, the ideal dominance distribution (later referred to as the ideal despotic distribution), and the effects of Allee’s Principle on these distributions. In the fifty years since the publication of this article, researchers have found these models to be incredibly useful for understanding territoriality and colonization in many species, including humans. While relatively slower to catch on in archaeology, these models have now been applied to the human colonization of Oceania, settlement patterning in Bronze Age Greece, ethnolinguistic diversity in prehistoric California, and the development of socially stratified and hierarchical societies. This session aims to showcase current research in ideal distribution modeling in archaeology from around the world.