Early Forager Responses to Ecological Changes in Southeastern North America

Summary

This is an abstract from the "American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The timing and process of initial human colonization of the Americas has been at the forefront of archaeological inquiry for more than a century. Today we have moved beyond simply asking “when?” and “from where?” did the first Americans arrive and are now able to investigate more nuanced questions about what life was like for those early foragers. The research presented here combines lithic analysis with large spatial datasets to investigate the settling in processes associated with some of the first foragers in southeastern North America. Southeastern foragers responded to ecological changes and possibly social pressures during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition by modifying their landscape use strategies to map onto a restructured resource base. Landscape use patterns shifted from being centered around aggregation sites during the Late Pleistocene to being focused on site communities during the Early Holocene as foragers were settling into smaller territories.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• American Foragers: Human-Environmental Interactions across the Continents   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41498.0