Eco-Cultural Niche Modeling: New Tools for Reconstructing the Geography and Ecology of Past Human Populations.

Abstract

Prehistoric human populations were influenced by climate change and resulting environmental variability and developed a wide variety of cultural mechanisms to deal with these conditions. In an effort to understand the in-fluence of environmental factors on prehistoric social and technical systems, there is a need to establish methods with which to model and evaluate the rules and driving forces behind these human-environment interactions. We describe a new set of analytical tools―an approach termed Eco-Cultural Niche Modeling (ECNM)―that can be used to address these issues and to test current hypotheses. This approach’s modeling architectures are used to reconstruct past human systems in the Old and New Worlds, past natural systems within which they oper-ated―namely geological, paleobiological and paleoenvironmental conditions―and also to develop informed hy-potheses concerning the geographic spread, migration, and eco-cultural adaptations of prehistoric human popula-tions. The ECNM approach has recently been developed and explored at two National Science Foundation- and European Science Foundation-funded workshops. We describe the goals and methods of ECNM, the results of the proof-of-concept projects, the analytical issues that remain unresolved, and the potential this approach has to offer the disciplines of paleoanthropology and archaeology.