Fire on the Mountain: The Ideal Free Distribution and Early Hunter-gatherer Demography in the Tennessee River Drainage, USA

ABSTRACT

The colonisation of North America and subsequent adaptation to climate change are major research foci in the American Southeast. Here, we used the Ideal Free Distribution from Behavioural Ecology and projections of fossil pollen to generate predictions for landscape use. We tested these predictions against the distribution of previously recorded projectile points in the Paleoindian Database of the Americas and archaeological sites in the Digital Index of North American Archaeology for the Tennessee River drainage from the appearance of Clovis sites in the terminal Pleistocene though the Late Holocene (∼13,250–3,000 cal BP). We found that the distribution of points and sites were initially skewed towards lower elevations, and then spread to higher elevations over the course of the Younger Dryas into the Middle Holocene, which is consistent with predictions of the Ideal Free Distribution. However, during the Middle Holocene, sites are more clustered, which is consistent with a shift to an Ideal Free Distribution with Allee effect that was likely driven by a broader distribution of oak–hickory forests. Finally, the distribution of sites after the Middle Holocene was more dispersed, which is consistent with a shift to an Ideal Despotic Distribution.

KEYWORDS:

• Ideal free distribution
• American Southeast
• Appalachian Mountains
• Paleoindian
• Archaic
• Landscape Archaeology

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the curators and contributors to the Paleoindian Database of the Americas, the Digital Index of North American Archaeology, and Williams et al.’s (2004) dataset. Using “big data” is a lot easier when you don’t have to struggle to track it down. This work was supported by the SRI Foundation, and we would also like to thank the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Cultural Resource Management Division, the Tennessee Division of Archaeology, and the site file managers from Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. Finally, we would like to thank Brian Codding and Elic Weitzel for inviting us to participate in a session dedicated to Fretwell and Lucas’s (1969) Ideal Free Distribution, a simple model with great utility for archaeology.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the SRI Foundation.

Notes on contributors

D. Shane Miller

D. Shane Miller received his PhD from the University of Arizona in 2014 and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. His primary research interests are the Ice Age colonization of the Americas, the origins of agriculture in eastern North America, and how we can use lithic technology, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and geoarchaeology to make inferences about past human behavior.

Stephen B. Carmody

Stephen B. Carmody is an assistant professor at Troy University that specializes in paleoethnobotony. His research explore rehistoric plant use for economic and ritual purposes. He earned his undergraduate degree from the College of Charleston and received his graduate degrees from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.