The study of coastal or riverine societies has a long history in anthropology and archaeology. However, one of the major problems archaeologists have yet to address realistically is the development of watercraft, not just as a technical innovation, but also its social implications. Indeed, studying the past without including watercraft technology would be like studying the present without automobiles. This is becoming a critical issue, as emerging archaeological data is pushing back the development of watercraft into the Late Pleistocene and Hunter-Fisher-Gatherer seafaring is becoming a focal point of the discussion on earlier coastal and insular colonization. Regardless of time period, attempting to reconstruct past aquatic mobility presents major challenges. A key issue is the scarcity of direct archaeological evidence on watercraft technology. Yet, from both a theoretical and empirical perspective there are still multiple lines of data and unexplored innovative methodologies to apply to seafaring research. Thus, while many works have evaluated maritime routes with a wide range of computational methods (three recent examples are Slayton 2018; Smith 2020; Fauvelle and Montenegro 2024), the integration of boats in the economics and everyday life of past seafaring Hunter-Gatherer peoples has yet to be fully explored (see Ames 2002).
The HUGASEA project aims to address these questions by studying the interplay between watercraft, environment and social strategies on the Northwest Coast of North America and the Fuego-Patagonian coast of Southern South America. For this, a combination of new and traditional methods will be applied, including the analysis of ethnohistoric and archaeological data, GIS-based methods, and Agent-based modelling (ABM) to simulate and test hypotheses about past seafaring (Figure 1). The application of GIS data into Agent-based modelling (ABM) proposed by HUGASEA is an innovative research method in archaeology (Davies et al. 2019) that can greatly contribute to discuss this type of questions. Four research objectives have been identified:
Objective 1: Integrate modern ecological data of the study areas into GIS-based models and reconstruct the archaeological settlement patterns of selected seafaring HFG societies.
Objective 2: Develop a seafaring HFG Agent-based Model (ABM) within GIS-based environments.
Objective 3: Explore the parametric space of the simulation, and design experiments to validate the model.
Objective 4: Predict spatial patterns of aquatic HFG, and analyse the interplay between environment, watercraft technology and social strategies.
Overall, HUGASEA results will help to understand how Hunter-Fisher-Gatherer used, understood and produced landscapes and seascapes, and how watercraft was integrated into production and everyday life on the NWC and the FPC. Furthermore, this research is expected to produce both a specific testing platform and spatial predictions that could be later applied to study past human-aquatic environment interaction. This is key to understanding new evidence along the Pacific coastlines of North and South America and bringing new perspectives to the peopling of the Americas debate.
References:
Ames, Kenneth M., 2002. Going by Boat: The Forage-Collector Continuum at Sea. In Fitzhugh B., Habu J. (Eds.) Beyond Foraging and Collecting. Fundamental Issues in Archaeology. Boston, MA, Springer: 19–52.
Davies, B., Romanowska, I., Harris, K., Crabtree, S.A. 2019. Combining Geographic Information Systems and Agent-Based Models in Archaeology: Part 2 of 3. Advances in Archaeological Practice 7, 185–193.
Fauvelle, Mikael, and Alvaro Montenegro. 2024. Do Stormy Seas Lead to Better Boats? Exploring the Origins of the Southern Californian Plank Canoe Through Ocean Voyage Modeling. Journal of Island & Coastal Archaeology.
Slayton, Emma Ruth. 2018. Seascape corridors : modeling routes to connect communities across the Caribbean Sea. Sidestone Press, Leiden.
Smith, Karl. 2020. Modelling Seafaring in Iron Age Atlantic Europe. PhD dissertation, Kellogg College, Oxford University, Oxford.
