Dr. Luciano Prates of the Department of Archaeology at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina) will present his talk Longstanding Controversies on the Early Peopling of South America: Temporal and Spatial Patterns of the Colonization Process. The lecture will present evidence on the early peopling of the Americas, which has been one of the most hotly contested topics in American anthropology and a research issue that draws archaeologists into a multidisciplinary debate. In South America, although the background data on this issue have increased exponentially in recent decades, the core questions related to the temporal and spatial patterns of the colonization process still remain open. In this talk these questions will be tackled in  light of the quantitative analysis of a screened radiocarbon database of more than 1600 early dates. The frequency of radiocarbon dates as proxies for assessing population growth will be explored to define a reliable and statistically well supported lower chronological bound(not to the exact date) for the earliest human arrival. On this basis the main hypotheses about the early peopling of America will be evaluated.