Certainty about Uncertainty: Lessons Learned from Modeling Human Land Use and Decision Making

Summary

A cornerstone of William Lovis’ career has been the investigation of human land use dynamics, with strong emphasis on methodological rigor and statistical analysis. He has led a generation of students to consider these issues in the Great Lakes and beyond. The modeling of past human decision making is useful as a heuristic for exploring goals and motivations, about which there is certainly a tremendous amount of uncertainty. Instead, modeling past behavior is inherently an exercise in balancing this uncertainty with assumptions, existing knowledge and theory, data (and their limitations), and technology. This paper will explore the role William Lovis played in inspiring and driving research in this vein. In the end, only deeper and broader insight about past natural and social-behavioral dynamics is to be gained when we push our research to the edge of uncertainty.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21220