Native American origins: A holistic synthesis

This work presents a departure from the traditional archaeological paradigm which has yielded an impasse in the study of the Pleistocene peopling and early prehistory of the Americas. By adopting a broad and holistic approach to the definition of relevant phenomena it is argued that extra-archaeological data and conclusions, independently obtained from other disciplines and subdisciplines, and internally consistent with the method and theory of those disciplines, should be incorporated into reconstructions of the early prehistory of the Americas. This approach, modeled in part on the multidisciplinary approach employed in paleoanthropology, is used in this work to generate a theoretical model and related hypotheses independent from the Pleistocene archaeological record of the Americas. The seventh chapter presents a comparison between the predictions of the theoretical model and a short sampling of Pleistocene American sites. The last chapter provides a closer examination of two early sites, while suggesting alternative methodological approaches. It is hoped that the adoption of the alternative approach presented in this work will provide a solution to the archaeological impasse which has characterized the field in the past.