Lessons from the Past: The Grand Human Journey to the New World

Summary

Migration is a fundamental aspect of humanity and archaeologists have long been interested in studies of human mobility. Some archaeologists have taken a historical ecological approach to understanding human movement and how a deep history can inform on mobility in contemporary society. By leveraging knowledge from a variety of disciplines, these archaeologists have made great strides in our understanding of past human movement as it relates to postglacial human dispersals and climate change, a pertinent topic for today. The initial human migration into the New World is an early human dispersal that has become a focal point in mobility research that strives to understand the impacts that climactic change and shifting environments have on human’s ability to successfully migrate and adapt to new lands. This presentation considers our current state of knowledge not only on how humans may have migrated into North and South America and adapted to their new surroundings, but also on what may have caused this initial migration to occur. Decades of interdisciplinary research, including more recent innovative projects, provide a wealth of data to consider how and why humans made the grand journey to the New World, and what this may mean for today’s society.

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): 21634