Inheritance, Innovation, and Interaction:the motivations for and consequences of social interaction in the context of initial settlement

Summary

While providing a general outline of several initial settlement strategies pursued across the Americas, I argue that social networks between the small-scale communities involved would be established rapidly upon arrival. Certainly, the events of initial contact and process of network formation would have occurred within a sub-generational time-frame. The flow of material goods, genes, and information between members of the small-scale pioneering communities is essential to the survival of initial populations and their continued expansion. As they moved into a new landscape, the establishment of these conduits would have been high on the priority lists of the early colonists leading us to ask several questions. Do the varied Terminal Pleistocene technological assemblages of the Americas indicate the existence of widespread and distinct cultural traditions? Are the expansive geographic areas of North and South America encompassed by some of these traditions comensurate with interaction systems? Finally, does the increasingly regionalized material culture in the millennia after ~8000 BP indicate a reduction in the geographic scope of networks or a more complex change in the role of interaction among Archaic populations?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The North American Continental System: Interaction and Exchange across the Continent   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15148