de Souza, Jonas GregorioAlcaina-Mateos, JonasMadella, Marco2021-03-182021-03-182020De Souza JG, Alcaina Mateos J, Madella M. Archaeological expansions in tropical South America during the late Holocene: assessing the role of demic diffusion. PLoS ONE. 2020 Apr 27; 15(4): e0232367. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.02323671932-6203http://hdl.handle.net/10230/46829Human expansions motivated by the spread of farming are one of the most important processes that shaped cultural geographies during the Holocene. The best known example of this phenomenon is the Neolithic expansion in Europe, but parallels in other parts of the globe have recently come into focus. Here, we examine the expansion of four archaeological cultures of widespread distribution in lowland South America, most of which originated in or around the Amazon basin and spread during the late Holocene with the practice of tropical forest agriculture. We analyze spatial gradients in radiocarbon dates of each culture through space-time regressions, allowing us to establish the most likely geographical origin, time and speed of expansion. To further assess the feasibility of demic diffusion as the process behind the archaeological expansions in question, we employ agent-based simulations with demographic parameters derived from the ethnography of tropical forest farmers. We find that, while some expansions can be realistically modeled as demographic processes, others are not easily explainable in the same manner, which is possibly due to different processes driving their dispersal (e.g. cultural diffusion) or problematic/incomplete archaeological data.application/pdfeng© 2020 Gregorio de Souza et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0232367Archaeological datingRadioactive carbon datingSouth AmericaGenetic algorithmsCeramicsPopulation densityinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess