The caribou didn't come back: Modelling human migration variations through local ecological changes

Summary

The objective of this paper is to model the effect that the presence/absence of specific ecological variables has on the passive movement of raw materials from their point of origin to their point of deposition in the archaeological record. This study takes place in the Talkeetna Mountains of Southcentral Alaska. The model was built using ArcGIS, informed through ethnographic, historic, and modern ecological and archaeological data, and structured using a theoretical framework from Human Behavioral Ecology. The results suggest significant differences occur in human migration patterns based on the presence/absence of specific prey items, and these inform further hypotheses of site structure and placement on the landscape.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage