Landscape Connectivity, Habitat Suitability and Cultural Transmission during the Last Glacial Maximum in Western Europe

Summary

During the Last Glacial Maximum the population of Western Europe contracted its range as the climate became less hospitable and more unpredictable. Mobility decisions must have been a key part of human adaptation during this time but are notoriously difficult to extract from archaeological data. Agent-based modelling offers one way to explore human mobility heuristically, producing test implications that can be tested using the archaeological record. We use a model of habitat suitability derived from archaeological site distributions, paleo-climate simulation data and environmental predictors to derive a GIS landscape (Burke et al. 2017). We then use an agent-based model to explore how this heterogeneous landscape affected patterns of inter-regional mobility and cultural transmission. We look at the impact of different mobility strategies, mobility radius, and the dynamics of cultural transmission to better understand the social context of the LGM’s archaeological record.

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): 22428