Five Decades of Paleoindian Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For over 50 years, David Anderson has investigated many aspects of the prehistory of North America, especially the American Southeast. At the start of his career, Clovis was considered the oldest evidence of a human presence in the Americas. Archaeological and genetic data now inform us that people were in the Americas from at least 15,000 to 16,000 years ago. This requires a reevaluation of everything we thought we knew about the First Americans—the route they took entering the Americas, how they dispersed across the landscape, the tools they made, how they interacted with the megafauna, and the meaning of Clovis. David Anderson has been at the forefront of Paleoindian research and has kept pace with these changes. He created the Paleoindian Database of the Americas (PIDBA) which presented the big picture—defining the distribution and density of Clovis and later fluted points across the landscape. His papers and books about the early prehistory of North America, especially the American Southeast, provide insight and ideas about the earliest people to inhabit this region. David Anderson has also been a mentor helping many early career scholars in their quest to dig into the prehistory of the American Southeast.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• *SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38424.0