A GIS Approach to Landscape Legibility and Its Role in Late Pleistocene Hominin Dispersals

Summary

The large-scale colonization of unfamiliar environments by Late Pleistocene humans would have required advanced navigational abilities. Archaeological signatures of spatial cognition are difficult to identify in Prehistory, although the presence of well-dated sites can help us track human mobility across the landscape. In this research, we test whether structural properties of the environment played an important role in helping humans navigate new landscapes, providing affordances for wayfinding that enabled people to quickly assimilate and make sense of their surroundings. To this end, we model a key geographic concept: landscape legibility. We present the results of a multi-scalar spatial analysis of Proto and Early Aurignacian site distribution in Western Europe, testing whether landscape legibility was a key factor in conditioning where people settled.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22633