What if the restaurant isn’t at the end of the universe but in a much nicer place?

Summary

In their 2012 paper, 'The restaurant at the end of the universe,' O’Connell and Allen developed a speculative and far-reaching model for the colonization of Sahul, one that sees initial populations as small, spatially concentrated in scattered ‘sweet’ spots, and which exhibited only occasional growth spurts and geographic expansion along extant coastlines. Although granting the obvious differences between the environmental stage and historical conditions under which the Pleistocene colonization of Sahul and the Americas took place, their model provides an opportunity to riff on the process(processes?) by which North America may have been colonized in the late Pleistocene; what may have served as triggers for the movement of people across what was arguably a far richer landscape than Sahul, and perhaps at faster rates; and serves as a useful heuristic device for identifying the types and availability of archaeological evidence by which the model can be put to the test.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• A Sense of Question: Papers in Honor of James F. O'Connell

Keywords

Spatial Coverage