Comparison of Circuit and Least Cost Path Modeling for Maritime Peopling of the Americas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Despite much recent scholarship there is still much to learn about the exact method, route, and timing of the Peopling of the New World. Geographic Information System (GIS) based analytical methods provide opportunities to model where and when coastal peopling events could have taken place. I will compare the results of traditional Least Cost Path models to Circuit Theory models and discuss how these techniques can be used to inform site prospection efforts. While previous scholarship has examined and compared the application of Least Cost Path and Circuit Theory models to terrestrial movement events, substantially less work has been done to compare the use of these methods in large scale maritime migration events in the deep past. To this end, I analyze results produced by both these methods using reconstructed coastlines (accounting for sea level change) as they would have existed 15,000 years BP, from multiple locations on the coast of British Columbia; including Barkley Sound, Prince Rupert Harbour, and the Dundas Islands. The results of this analysis as well as the strengths and weakness of both approaches are discussed in the context of early movement events in the Americas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23975