2008 Visiting Scholar Conference: Biological and Archaeological Variation in the New World

Prior to colonization by Europeans, the peoples of the Americas exhibited a great multiplicity of cultures and, potentially, great human morphological diversity. This diversity was shaped by the environments encountered by humans as they settled across the New World, and by interactions among populations. Much of the current discussion among both archaeologists and biological anthropologists has focused on the origins of this diversity. An interdisciplinary understanding of human variation-both cultural and biological-in more recent populations from throughout the Holocene is essential, however, in order to place the earliest, fragmentary evidence into context.

This, the 25th annual Center for Archaeological Investigations Visiting Scholar Conference, will renew a dialogue about cultural and biological variation in the New World. Over two days, skeletal biologists and geneticists will be discussing evidence of human diversity in the Americas before a multidisciplinary audience of archaeologists and biologists. Archaeologists will be presenting their perspectives and responses to this biological evidence, initiating a synthesis of cultural and biological diversity among the populations of North and South America, and relating this to the environments that shaped them. Though this conversation, the conference will generate a context by which to better understand the emerging evidence of the complex relationships that created the cultures and biology of pre-contact populations in the New World.