Climate change, cultural adaptations, and lower coastal plain occupations of Georgia and Florida from the early to middle Holocene: Extrapolating spatial trends into the offshore

Abstract Predictive modeling for high probability zones for detection of submerged prehistoric sites remains an integral part of this subdiscipline. It typically relies on a combination of physiographic parameters detectable in offshore zones and known archaeological trends, most of which lie onshore, not offshore. These models are not always temporally and spatially scaled to account for changes in cultural practices and/or baseline ecological conditions associated with climate changes, however. To account better for these potential variations, we used a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based spatial statistical analysis method. Our study seeks evidence of variation in site correlations to environmental patterns to detect spatial and temporal variation in site locations, and for where site patterns depart from robust quantitative correlations to ecological conditions. Our results support a hypothesis that sites do tend to correlate to certain ecological parameters, but these effects vary across the study area and through time. We also found that some site groups did not correlate well to any particular set of hypothetically favorable ecological conditions, suggesting that other undetected variables played significant roles in those site locations. These may be undetected/untested ecological variables or may represent culturally-based decision making with non-linear relationships with ecological conditions.