Epilog

This brief essay has attempted as much to point out major historical developments in the first peopling of the Americas as some of the limitations of our thoughts and to suggest different avenues of research on early human migration and colonization. Although not a primary theme here, little attention has been given to the concrete steps we need to take toward more profitable future research. It thus seems fitting that this essay should end in emphasizing, not the inferences to which the current evidence seems to point, but rather ways to improve that evidence and our interpretation of it. One way to improve it is to enlarge and fill out the archaeological record in traditional terms of finding, excavating, dating, and publishing more sites. The relatively few sites and archaeological patterns mentioned in this article, and fewer still which are fully published, are an obvious handicap. Second, reliable dating methods need to be more widely applied to sites if we are to identify regional trends and processes of migration and colonization with greater precision. Third, systematic attention must be applied to faunal, floral, settlement, and other data, which in turn must be integrated with other data sets (genetics, human skeletal, geological, linguistic) in order to study more closely the changing relationships between independent and dependent climatic and cultural variables. Fourth, specialists need to model their data and interpretations more in terms of process-dependent and context-dependent culture change over long periods of time vast spaces in the Americas. In order to test the kinds of relationships discussed above, many more sites require investigation for the purpose of identifying the dynamics of big and little culture traditions. Finally, relatively new methods that have been successfully applied elsewhere to relate artifact differences and similarities to the cultures producing them should be brought to bear on the problems discussed here.

See also: Americas, South: Ear'y Cultures of the Central Andes; Extinctions of Big Game; Plant Domestication.