Fire on the Mountain: Colonizing South Appalachia in the Early Holocene

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We use the Ideal Free Distribution from Behavioral Ecology as a null model to interpret the distribution of previously recorded archaeological sites in the Tennessee and Duck River Valleys in central Tennessee from the appearance of Clovis sites in the terminal Pleistocene though the Early Holocene (~13,250 – 8,880 cal yr BP). We hypothesized that the distribution of Clovis sites would be skewed towards lower elevations, and then subsequent populations would spread to higher elevations over the course of the Younger Dryas and Early Holocene as boreal forests were replaced by mixed hardwood, deciduous forests. Our results are consistent with other studies that have proposed that the Cumberland Plateau and the Appalachian Highlands were not intensively occupied until well after the disappearance of the Clovis culture. Using data provided by the Digital Index of North American Archaeology, we expand our analysis to the entirety of the Tennessee River Valley to explore the colonization of the South Appalachian Mountain in the American Southeast.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23342