ABSTRACT
From the perspectives of archaeology and palaeogeography a number of processes are implicated in the colonization of formerly uninhabited regions. First, there is the natural tendency of species to expand to fill their ecological niche. Second, human communities adapted to life in the boreal-tundra transitional zone are likely to have moved north with that zone as a policy designed to maintain a successful adaptation. Third, population growth will have provided a stimulus to expansion into unoccupied areas. In an important paper drawing on data from an ethnographic study of recent hunter-gatherer communities dependent on terrestrial animals, Binford (1999: 8) has suggested that a critical threshold is reached at 1.57 persons per 100 km2 (0.0016/km2), at which point structural changes take place that may involve a diversification of subsistence or the budding off of the surplus component in the population to found new communities. Population displacement caused by rising sea levels will have had the same effect by creating population increases in areas not subject to inundation. Although it may be a principle of ecology that species expand to fill their niche, in the case of humans this is not a random process but the result of decisions taken by individuals to venture into new, and at times unfamiliar, areas. Any deviation from the normal annual cycle is likely to have been a significant social event. The ability to find new hunting grounds or sources of raw materials may have been an additional social cachet to that of being a successful hunter, while the skill to help the group maintain a traditional way of life in the face of often rapid environmental change probably brought similar benefits to the individual concerned, as would the ability successfully to negotiate social relations within the context of a rising population. The benefits to the individuals concerned are likely to have been a stimulus to expansion, and the possibility of an ‘ethos’ of expansion and colonization is worth considering, particularly as this was a time when significant environmental changes were occurring within the span of a single generation. One of the most significant features – perhaps the most significant feature – in any group’s environment is other groups, and considerations that apply at the level of the individual also apply to the co-residential, or local, group. Those groups best fitted to coping with the pressures presented by a dynamic environmental and social arena are likely to be those with strongly cohesive but flexible social relations. Of crucial importance in this social arena is the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge about the natural and social environment, and landscape learning must be viewed as a social matter as well as a process of ecological adjustment.
