Living Room Lecture: The Coastal Maritime Migration Hypothesis

The peopling of the Americas during the late Pleistocene has been an enduring topic of archaeological interest for over a century. It was long argued that Clovis big game hunters entered North America through an ice-free corridor. Alternatively, Knut Fladmark in 1979 argued that they may have traversed by foot along the coast. In recent decades it has been argued that Paleoindians, who occupied the Northern Channel Islands around 13,000 years ago, may have employed sophisticated watercraft to migrate down the coast.

In the last few years, Mark Sutton has argued that if competent mariners originally occupied the Northern Channel Islands, then the Southern Channel Islands would have been occupied shortly thereafter. However, this did not take place until four millennia later. To explore these hypotheses, Jim Cassidy proposes that universal features of watercraft design and construction may be employed to inform on the technological requirements of seafarers to colonize the Southern Channel Islands during the early Holocene. This event will be held on Zoom.