What More Can We Learn about Complex Prehistoric Phenomena from an Aged, Simple Model?

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.

The Ideal Free Distribution is a heuristic device used for understanding or explaining behavior as a product of density-dependent habitat selection. More recently, the model has been used to track the emergence of social and political complexity through change in the patterns of prehistoric habitat selection. There may be many other ways that the logic of this simple model might reveal complex sociocultural phenomena through observation of indirect or seemingly unrelated material remains. And yes, most archaeologists are exuberantly skeptical. Here I’d like to explore a variant of the model focused on choices about behavioral repertoires rather than resource habitats. In particular I explore the utility of the adjusted model for understanding subsistence transitions such as the shift from foraging to farming.

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)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26009