Prearchaic Land Use in Grass Valley, NV: A Novel Statistical Implementation of Optimal Distribution Models

Summary

Despite decades of work, debate persists regarding the nature and extent of Prearchaic land use patterns in the North American Great Basin. While some archaeologists argue that Prearchaic hunter-gatherers favored a broad diet and, therefore, relied on a generalist land use strategy, others insist that they favored a narrow diet, thus relying instead on a specialist land use strategy. To help resolve these debates, here we ask the simple question: what environmental parameters drive variation in Prearchaic settlement decisions? To answer this question, we undertake a modelling exercise that evaluates Prearchaic settlement locations in Grass Valley, NV relative to measures of habitat suitability informed by Ideal Free Distribution and implemented using a Maximum Entropy approach to species distribution modeling. The results of this case study provide a quantitative measure of factors that structured land use decisions in the Great Basin prior to 9000 BP.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22124