Forager Mobility, Landscape Learning, and the Colonization of the Americas

Summary

Among the many important contributions that Robert Kelly has made to the archaeological and anthropological literature are 1) an elegant theoretical model of forager residential movement, presented in his book The Foraging Spectrum, 2) a very influential argument about the Paleoindian colonization of the Americas, which he developed along with Lawrence Todd, and 3) insightful discussions of landscape learning by hunter-gatherers. Here, we explore these issues further by expanding Kelly’s residential movement model to incorporate aspects of landscape learning. This provides a framework for addressing the question of when it is more economical for foragers in a new landscape to learn how to acquire novel resources rather than move in pursuit of resources with which they are already familiar, a question that is central to many discussions of the colonization of new regions. Implications of the model for the North American archaeological record are also considered.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Foraging Spectra: Hunter-Gatherer Diversity in Prehistory

Keywords

Spatial Coverage