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ARCHAEOLOGY TODAY
Brian Codding (Stanford Post-Doc): "Ideal Free Distribution and the Development of Ethnolinguistic Diversity in Central California"
Thursday May 31, 2012 | 05:00 -07:00 PM | Stanford Archaeology Center

Title:
Ideal Free Distribution and the Development of Ethnolinguistic Diversity in Central California

Abstract:
Compared with adjacent regions like the Great Basin, California stands anomalous in the amount of linguistic diversity observed at the time contact with Europeans. Decades of ethnographic, archaeological and linguistic research has produced detailed stories of the individual migrations that aggregated to build this ethnolinguistic mosaic, but few have attempted to explain the process by which these migrations happened and why such a mosaic didn't build up elsewhere. In this paper, I examine the ways in which foraging decisions articulate with underlying ecological variability through an ideal free distribution model to help explain why repeated migrations resulted in a greater density of different ethnolinguistic groups in California, but not elsewhere.

Bio:
Brian Codding is received his PhD from the department of Anthropology at Stanford. Currently he is a Postdoc at the Bill Lane Center for the American West and the department of Anthropology. At the moment he is working on multiple ethnographic and archaeological research projects in California and Western Australia examining the ecology of foraging economies in the past and present.