Where to Inhabit First? Interpreting Western Stemmed Tradition Land-Use with the Ideal Free Distribution Model in Lake County, Oregon

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the Intermountain West there is mounting evidence that some Western Stemmed Tradition (WST) points are as old, if not older, than Clovis points on the Plains and in the Southwest. Given this, the distribution of WST points may hold the key to understanding how people initially populated the Far West. I use WST point and site location data in Lake County, Oregon collected using the Oregon Archaeological Records Remote Access (OARRA) to test predictions of the ideal free distribution (IFD) model. The IFD model predicts that people will settle higher-ranked habitats first (in this case, large marshes) and lower-ranked later (smaller marshes or other habitats) in the face of rising populations and declining returns. Using existing paleoenvironmental records for four adjacent lake basins and working chronology for various stemmed point types, I test the hypothesis that people settled around productive wetlands during the Younger Dryas and later expanded into smaller basins or other zones during the early Holocene. This process may hold clues for broader discussions about how and when people spread throughout the Intermountain West and beyond.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33092