Session Details

The goal of this symposium is to integrate recently accumulated information concerning the availability of space and animals for the first human explorers of South America. Most of the evidence previously used to construct models of the peopling process was derived from caves, and rarely made use of other classes of data. The symposium participants will describe and interpret (1) palaeontological evidence recovered from underwater loci along the Pacific coast and open-air locations in the interior, (2) archaeological evidence from extensive coastal open-air sites, and (3) palaeoclimatic and palaeoecological proxy evidence obtained from lake cores, peatlands, and other repositories. A more integrated and multidisciplinary panoramic view will be provided of the conditions under which the earliest human explorations took place in South America.