The Effects of ENSO on Travel along the Pacific Coast of the Americas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For decades, prehistoric contacts have been suggested between Ecuador and western Mexico, occurring from 400 BC, if not earlier, to the sixteenth century based on similarities in mortuary behaviors, ceramic technology, language, and ethnohistoric accounts, and other lines of evidence. However, the frequency of these patterns and the degree to which they were sustained is currently unknown. In this paper, we harness newly collected climatic data and computer simulations of seafaring to build on a previous study that examined the difficulty of maintaining sustained contact between these two areas and the level of seafaring capabilities and navigational and wayfinding skills that would have been necessary to make these trips. The present analysis, which also incorporates the effects of ENSO variability on winds and currents, provides a more robust framework for which distributions of cultural traits, genes, and languages can be compared, allowing for a better understanding of presumed patterns and mechanisms of prehistoric contacts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22858