Spatiotemporal Modeling of the Archaeological Landscape in the Shoshone National Forest

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 2002, Dr. Lawrence Todd initiated a multiyear interdisciplinary survey in the Shoshone National Forest in northwest Wyoming. Dr. Todd and his team have meticulously documented several thousand individual artifacts per year. While they only sampled a small fraction of the forest, Dr. Todd’s work has dramatically improved our understanding of this archaeological landscape and its prehistoric periods. In addition, his efforts have enhanced our understanding of land use in this area and the Rocky Mountains in general. Since 2009, the authors have been using this information collected at the artifact level to produce probability maps covering the Shoshone National Forest. These continue to be improved as additional sampling efforts add new artifacts to the sample and new modeling techniques become available. The models have accurately captured up to 90% of independent artifact clusters in high probability areas, which occupy 20% of the forest. We will present our current model iterations focusing on interpreting changing land use intensity through time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36766.0