Hunter-Gatherer mobility and technological landscapes in southernmost South America: a statistical learning approach

AHEDO, VIRGINIA; TURNES, LUCAS; CARO, JORGE; ÁLVAREZ, MYRIAN; SANTOS, JOSÉ IGNACIO; BRIZ I GODINO, IVAN; GALÁN, JOSÉ MANUEL; PAL, NÉLIDA; ZURRO, DÉBORA

Royal Society Open Science

The Royal Society Publishing

Lugar: London; Año: 2018 vol. 5

The present work aims to quantitatively explore andunderstand the relationship between mobility types (nauticalversus pedestrian), specific technological traits andshared technological knowledge in pedestrian hunter?gatherer and nautical hunter?fisher?gatherer societies fromthe southernmost portion of South America. To that end,advanced statistical learning techniques are used: state-of-the-artclassification algorithms and variable importance analyses.Results show a strong relationship between technologicalknowledge, traits and mobility types. Occupations can beaccurately classified into nautical and pedestrian due to the existence of a non-trivial pattern between mobility and a relatively small fraction of variables fromsome specific technological categories. Cases where the best-fitted classification algorithm fails togeneralize are found significantly interesting. These instances can unveil lack of information, notenough entries in the training set, singular features or ambiguity, the latter case being a possibleindicator of the interaction between nautical and pedestrian societies.