You're Going to Carry that Weight a Long Time

Summary

Mobility is a phenomenon of importance across all past and present societies. For hunter-gatherers, mobility structures ecological strategies, social organization, and response to environmental change. For prehistoric societies, we cannot observe mobility but it is possible to study it through a proxy record of discarded material items and biological remains that form the archaeological record. Increasingly archaeological practice has shifted from proposing intuitive links between mobility and the archaeological record to developing testable hypotheses evaluated through systematic, controlled experimentation. Computational modeling is becoming an important tool applied to this effort, for testing intuitively proposed relationships and discovering unexpected, counterintuitive ones.

Building on prior modeling experiments on mobility and formation of the lithic archaeological record, we examine the impacts of the geographical extent of hunter-gatherer movement on technological and compositional characteristics of accumulated lithic assemblages. We situate these computational modeling experiments in a digital representation of a humanized landscape in which both stone outcrops and archaeological sites are potentially exploitable and potentially finite resources.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21195