Living Room Lecture: Maritime Migration
The peopling of the Americas during the late Pleistocene has been an enduring topic of archaeological interest for over a century. It was long argued that Clovis big game hunters entered North America through an ice-free corridor. Alternatively, Knut Fladmark in 1979 argued that they may have traversed by foot along the coast. In recent decades it has been argued that Paleoindians, who occupied the Northern Channel Islands around 13,000 years ago, may have employed sophisticated watercraft to migrate down the coast.
In the last few years, Mark Sutton has argued that if competent mariners originally occupied the Northern Channel Islands, then the Southern Channel Islands would have been occupied shortly thereafter. However, this did not take place until four millennia later. To explore these hypotheses, Jim Cassidy proposes that universal features of watercraft design and construction may be employed to inform on the technological requirements of seafarers to colonize the Southern Channel Islands during the early Holocene.
Date: Thursday, April 6, 2023
Time: 6:30 PM
Location: Online on Zoom
Cost: Pay what you wish
Register for Lecture
Registration closes at 4 PM on Thursday, April 6.
About the Presenter
Dr. Jim Cassidy completed his Ph.D. in anthropological archaeology at the University of California Santa Barbara, specializing in the prehistory of maritime societies. He has conducted field research on the California Channel Islands, the Maritime Region of the Russian Far East, and Baja California. He co-authored the book California Maritime Prehistory and co-edited an upcoming book on the Maritime Prehistory of Northeast Asia.
