American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Americas exhibit a massive range of environmental settings and hunter-gatherer lifeways that are often considered at a regional level. However, consideration of archaeological records more broadly across different ecologies and regions is essential for understanding the relationship between environmental variables and human behavior. Exploring the archaeological records of diverse North and South American landscapes in relation to each other facilitates the exploration of topics such as cultural transmission, mobility and migration, resource exploitation, and the ways that humans’ adaptation to their local environments shaped the archaeological record we study today. By considering the many manifestations of the foraging economy in the Americas, this session will strengthen our ability to make cross-regional comparisons for continents unique for their relatively recent peopling. This symposium brings together early-career and established scholars to present research on forager-environmental interactions in regions across the Americas, including the Arctic, the Andes, the Great Plains, the Colorado Plateau, the Great Basin, the North American Southeast, and Patagonia. Discussion at this level will demonstrate the importance of considering different regions in relation to each other when interpreting past human behaviors.