South america 18,000 years ago: topographic accessibility and human spread

MIOTTI LAURA; MAGNIN LUCÍA

Current Research in the Pleistocene

TAMU

Lugar: Texas; Año: 2012 vol. Spec p. 19 - 24

8755-898X

Keywords: Human colonization, digital models, Pleistocene/Holocene, South America Theorized entrance routes to the South American continent have been debated throughout the twentieth century (i.e., Martin 1973; Sauer 1944), and they are still being discussed and contested. Among the factors analyzed in the diverse theories are demographic considerations,paleoenvironmental conditions, the effect of natural barriers, the availability of resources necessary for survival, and various technologies used by the first colonizers. Most prevailing theories propose that populations either followed a strategy of terrestrial advance or moved along rivers and coastlines. The models for settlement of early America therefore propose two fundamentally different lifeways for these highly mobile groups, terrestrially adapted (Martin 1973) and water adapted (Bryan 1978; Dixon 2000; Erlandson 2001; Fladmark 1983; Meltzer 1993. In the first case, human movements adhered to a terrestrial-advance strategy; in the second case, population movements followed rivers and coastlines (Miotti 2006). Methodologically, models predicting possible routes have applied several lines of evidence,such as human craniometrics and genetic analysis (Meltzer 1993; O?Rourke and Raff 2010;Pucciarelli et al. 2006), demographic simulations (Gillam et al. 2007; Steele et al. 1998), and digital modeling of territorial analysis (Anderson and Gillam 2000). This paper proposes a geographic digital-modeling approach, such as that suggested by Anderson and Gillam (2000). Our main goal is to contrast two digital models of terrain accessibility generated for South America presented by Magnin et al. (this volume), against archaeological data for the earliest occupations on the continent.