Fire on the Mountain: The Ideal Free Distribution and Early Hunter-gatherer Demography in the Tennessee River Drainage, USA

The colonisation of North America and subsequent adaptation to climate change are major research foci in the American Southeast. Here, we used the Ideal Free Distribution from Behavioural Ecology and projections of fossil pollen to generate predictions for landscape use. We tested these predictions against the distribution of previously recorded projectile points in the Paleoindian Database of the Americas and archaeological sites in the Digital Index of North American Archaeology for the Tennessee River drainage from the appearance of Clovis sites in the terminal Pleistocene though the Late Holocene (∼13,250–3,000 cal BP). We found that the distribution of points and sites were initially skewed towards lower elevations, and then spread to higher elevations over the course of the Younger Dryas into the Middle Holocene, which is consistent with predictions of the Ideal Free Distribution. However, during the Middle Holocene, sites are more clustered, which is consistent with a shift to an Ideal Free Distribution with Allee effect that was likely driven by a broader distribution of oak–hickory forests. Finally, the distribution of sites after the Middle Holocene was more dispersed, which is consistent with a shift to an Ideal Despotic Distribution.