Pub Talk! Ice Age Americans and the Giant Python Problem

DiscourseBHAM! It’s like a college class, but there’s drinking.

One of archaeology’s biggest debates is when and how people first arrived in the Americas. To get at that question, this talk turns to a surprising and terrifying source: Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades. By putting these two stories side by side, this talk offers a vivid new way to think about how humans first spread across a continent, and a reminder that sometimes the best way to understand the distant past is to look closely at the present.

Dr. Shane Miller is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alabama. A prehistoric archaeologist, his research focus includes the peopling of the Americas and the origins of agriculture in North America, among other topics. He works principally at Paleoindian and archaic sites throughout the Southeast region but also is invested in research elsewhere (he has even recently been working at Middle Stone Age cave sites in Morocco) and is a sophisticated methodologist.