Because history is inaccessible to experimentation, agent-based and other simulations are a main source to explore theories about pre-historical humanity. Continent-scale migrations are of great interest in this context. With advances in computing and GIS, tracking entire populations migrating across continents become accessible in simulation. In this paper, I present a network representing North and South America for such tasks. The nodes roughly follow a hexagonal grid and represent small territories around a focal point. They are annotated with the carrying capacity for hunter-gatherers per ecoregion in the vicinity. The edge weights represent the travel times between the focal points on foot or by boat. I validate the network by comparing its predicted optimal path between Nashville, TN and Natchez, MI with the route of the historical Natchez Trace.

This paper identifies time calibration points for accurately rooting and dating the phylogeny of Arawakan, the largest Indigenous linguistic family of the Americas. We present and model a methodology for extracting calibration points from the archaeological record, based on principles of geographical overlap between archaeological sites and Arawakan peoples, and on continuity in material culture between archaeological finds and modern Arawakan practices. Based on a consensus model of the expansion of the Arawakan family from Central Amazonia, we focus on archaeological finds in Arawakan expansion zones, where Arawakan material culture abruptly appears in a given region, and where only a single major Arawakan subgroup/clade is present. We find 12 calibration points from archaeological sites in Arawakan expansion zones and also identify more recent calibration points from the historical record based on first mentions of ethnonyms and early sources of lexical data.