The Determination of Paleo-Indian Territoriality through the Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis of Paleo-Indian Fluted Points and their Lithic Sources

摘要

Territories have long been proposed for highly mobile Early Paleo-Indians based on the presence of their distinctive fluted point. However, there has not yet been a systematic spatial and statistical analysis of fluted points and their lithic sources to determine if the territories did exist or if Fluted Point peoples remained free wandering. By first determining if cultural groups could be inferred from point morphology and then examining the transportation of fluted points away from their lithic source, this study takes an objective view of the large number of fluted points to understand their distribution patterning using Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) to test this hypothesis. The final result derives possible territories that were traversed by these early pioneers.