The Physics of Landscape Exploration and the Design of Mobile Toolkits

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Far-Reaching Influence of Steven L. Kuhn" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Steve Kuhn has long pushed us to consider the decisions that go into the design and maintenance of mobile toolkits. Foragers must contend with variable raw material distributions, the economics of stone transport, the limits of lithic technological design, and the uncertainties inherent to foraging. Inspired by Kuhn’s work, I use a neutral model to look at how mobility drives the exploration of space and may impact foraging uncertainty. At an abstract level, mobility produces an inner compact region of frequent, repeated exploitation and an outer diffuse region of infrequent encounters. In the inner compact region there should be few foraging surprises, while in the latter most moves expose potentially new foraging conditions. I argue that the design goals for mobile toolkits should be quite different in these two regions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• The Far-Reaching Influence of Steven L. Kuhn

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52249