Paleoindian Responses to Environmental Change on the Southern High Plains

Abstract

The theory presented in Chapter 2 relating human land use and organization to ungulate herding and migration patterns is clearly relevant to the basic adaptation outlined in the preceeding chapter. However, the nature of the data available on the Paleoindian occupants of the study area puts very different constraints on this section of the discussion than did the data available on recent Plains societies. The relationship proposed here between a region’s environment and the organization of the people living in that environment has two distinct components: first, it predicts the distribution of the human population across the landscape and, second, it predicts the effects of this distribution on human organization. In an archaeological context, the first of these predictions is much more easily examined than the second. Reconstructions of prehistoric land use and patterns of aggregation and dispersion are relatively common in archaeological research, but the material correlates of organizational differences among relatively simple societies are rarely studied.