digital archaeology (Other Keyword)
51-75 (312 Records)
As digital methods have become more ubiquitous in archaeology, the challenge of teaching those methods has become important. Beyond the question of how and what we teach, however, there is an equally important challenge - how do we build communities of practice populated by scholars who are connected through a shared perspective on both the methods and the thoughtful application of those methods. In is within this context that this paper will explore an approach developed at Michigan State...
Cataloging Cave Features in the Southern Pacbitun Regional Archaeological Project using Virtual Reality and 3D Modeling (2018)
Since 2010, a major focus of the Pacbitun Regional Archaeological project has been a regional ritual landscape survey surrounding. In 2016, Phase II of that subproject commenced, with significant efforts geared towards experimenting with digital mapping and documentation of surface archaeological features in four poorly understood caves, Crystal Palace, Slate Cave, Tzul’s Cave, and Actun Tokbe. In this paper, we discuss our work and offer some results from our Phase II investigations. In 2016,...
Cerro Cumbray: A Chimu Frontier Outpost (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cerro Cumbray is a Chimu hilltop settlement located near the modern town of Simbal, Peru. During the 2018 field season, the authors used aerial photography via drone to create a site map and conducted a limited pedestrian survey in order to better understand site chronology and context. While Cerro Cumbray lacks indications of large-scale fortification; the...
Cerro de En medio, a Hidden Epiclassic Site in the Northern Frontier of Mesoamerica (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the analysis of the role of violence underlying the settlement pattern at Cerro de En medio, Aguascalientes, Mexico, located in the northern frontier of Mesoamerica. Violence is one of the social forces that shape the decision making involved in selecting a place to settle. This paper focuses on understanding the role of defensibility as a...
Chacoan Complexities (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Openness & Sensitivity: Practical Concerns in Taking Archaeological Data Online" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Chaco Research Archive (CRA, chacoarchive.org) has been available since 2004 and the Salmon Pueblo Archaeological Research Collection (SPARC, salmonpueblo.org) launched in May of 2018. These web-based portals, as their names indicate, were both designed primarily with the academic researcher in mind....
The Challenge of the Grid: A Conceptual Frontier in Angkor? (2018)
For a quarter of a century, the concepts of an open city and a low density urban megalopolis have largely broadened our understanding of Angkor (Cambodia), which was based on the morpho-chronological vision of a succession of perfectly geometric walled cities. As the researches progressed, the identification of the elements that make up the archaeological landscape of the Great Angkor has been developed, mixing temples, palaces, settlements, reservoirs, road networks, hydraulic systems and...
Challenges and Successes of Mapping Royal Tombs and a Newly Discovered Mound Feature Using a Total Station at Nuri, Sudan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Community Matters: Enhancing Student Learning Opportunities through the Development of Community Partnerships" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The University of Arizona and Pima Community College collaborated to initiate an archaeological expedition to Nuri, Sudan in January 2018. The site, looted in antiquity and excavated by George Reisner from 1916 through 1918, includes 56 mud brick pyramids and 72 known tombs. One...
A Chimera Spider at Play: Making, Creativity and Collaboration in Digital Archaeology (2015)
In an interview with Michael Shanks and Christopher Witmore, Ruth Tringham describes her experiments with digital remediations of the past as "expressing and sharing the complex web of relationships and ambiguities that is an essential dimension of the feminist practice of archaeology" (Rathje et. al 2013). As such, Tringham’s practice of digital making was an explicitly political expression of archaeological investigation, not as explanation, but as an interpretive process. She shared the...
CITiZAN’s Digital Toolkit: Citizen Scientists Recording England’s At-Risk Coastal Archaeology (2018)
England’s coastal and intertidal archaeology is increasingly at risk from winds, waves, rising sea levels and winter storms exacerbated by climate change and can be revealed suddenly and disappear just as suddenly. However there is no statutorily informed intervention for this heritage outside of the national planning framework for this at-risk archaeology and so no infrastructure in place to systematically record these freshly exposed sites before the next storm potentially washes them away....
Citizen Science Archaeology at Bodie State Historic Park (2018)
Bodie State Historic Park is located in the western Great Basin, near the California and Nevada border and encompasses a 2,900-acre historical landscape comprised of buildings, archaeological sites, and features related to 80 years of Gold Rush era mining. Cultural and natural resources at Bodie are at risk of being lost due to wildfires, earthquakes, and lack of funding. Discussing the application of digital heritage methods in the Bodie 3D Project, this paper focuses on community-engaged...
Classic Maya Household Inequality in Southern Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Inequality is present in all forms of human societies, but the degree of inequality within a single city or region varies. Recently in archaeological contexts, inequality has been quantitatively evaluated based on house size using the Gini coefficient and Lorenz Curve, thus enabling the comparison of wealth measures and inequality between ancient cities of...
Classification of Fremont Ceramics Using a Neural Network (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic classification is central to archaeological analysis, but without systematic and objective quantification, archaeologists cannot determine the definitive number of types or what they represent, despite decades of research. Recently archaeologists have applied machine learning models to improve the effectiveness of ceramic classification and extend...
Co-Creating Digital Heritage Resources in Ghana: How Is It Going? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Funded by a Canadian SSHRC-funded partnership development grant, our working group of collaborators is engaged in training and capacity building in digital heritage methods in Ghana. Project aims include fostering a community of practice inclusive of archaeologists, heritage practitioners, students...
Communities of Art Practices on the Lower Columbia River: Technical Photography Using Infrared, UV, and Visible Light (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recovered from strata, stolen, sold off to feed their families, gifted, or commissioned for museum display Lower Columbia River or Chinookan carved stone effigies and artifacts are currently scattered across numerous collections and repositories. Previous analyses of Chinookan art styles have been limited to classifying motif attributes, but this research...
Community, Co-design, and Climate: Case Studies in Designing Public Outreach for Arctic Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Climate and Heritage in the North Atlantic: Burning Libraries" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological visualization—the task of picturing the past in the present—exists at the intersections of data collection, interpretation, local perspectives, and artfully crafted storytelling. This type of science communication and public engagement work forms a core dimension of archaeology today, particularly for projects...
A Comparative Spatial Analysis of Ancient Palaces (2018)
Ancient palatial complexes offer opportunities to understand the actors at the apex of prehistoric polities. With careful and complex design, these structures were built to represent the affluence of those who resided within their confines. While the external façade of a palace represents the defining barrier between the elite and the public, the architectural layouts of ancient palaces reveal multiple levels of exclusivity. The varying levels of privacy in different palaces may relate to the...
Considering Communities of Practice throughout the Data Lifecycle (2018)
The use of digital tools for data creation and presentation is pervasive in archaeology, and data preservation and dissemination is becoming common practice. Still, few archaeologists consider the life of their data beyond their own research purposes. This lack of broader consideration of the future uses of a dataset means that many researchers do not sufficiently describe their data to make it intelligible or useful to others, which risks filling repositories with data of very limited use. We...
Constructing Difference: Defense, Sensory Experience, and Social Difference at a Late Prehispanic Hillfort (Arequipa, Peru) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Round House: Spatial Logic and Settlement Organization across the Late Andean Highlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The fortified settlement of Auquimarka was one of many hilltop fortifications built during the Late Intermediate Period (1000 – 1450 CE) in the Colca Valley of the southern Peruvian highlands. While most fortifications fell into disuse following Inka expansion into the region, Auquimarka...
Contemporary Views on Clovis Learning and Colonization (2018)
The timing of the earliest colonization of North America is debatable, but what is not at issue is the point of origin of the early colonists: Humans entered the continent from Beringia and then made their way south along or near the Pacific Coast and/or through a corridor than ran between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets in western North America. At some point they abandoned their arctic-based tool complex for one more adapted to an entirely different environment. The dispersal of that...
Context-Specific Applications of Space Syntax on African Urban Sites (2018)
Organisation of space in preserved buildings and town layouts in sub-Saharan Africa have increasingly been in the research scope of archaeologists and architectural historians alike. The methods of space syntax and its associated theory have, especially since 2000’s, paved its way to African archaeology and used for new interpretations of architecture e.g. of Benin, Dahomey and the Swahili coast. Traditionally, space syntax is undertaken using access analysis graphs for individual buildings,...
Creating Communities of Collaboration through Digital Archaeology and the Digital Humanities (2015)
Over the last 10 years, I’ve been involved in various forms of "digital archaeology" with different forms of public and community outreach. In this paper I profile the more and less successful forms of public and community engagement entailed in these digital efforts. I also discuss current efforts to concurrently engage in humanistic and scientific forms of digital archaeology through communities of collaboration. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American...
Creating Context: Analyzing Legacy Documentary Data to Understand the Emergence of Enslaved Societies at Flowerdew Hundred Plantation (2019)
This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By late 1619, 15 of the first 25 enslaved Africans imported into British North America were laboring at Flowerdew Hundred, a thousand acre plantation on the James River in Virginia. They joined indentured Europeans, neighboring Weanock Indians, and elite European landowners in shaping the mid-17th century expansion of plantation settlements across the...
The Current State of the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) (2017)
The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) is expanding from its initial proof-of-concept phase, scaling to a truly continental effort. As a linked open data hub for information related to archaeological sites, DINAA interoperates governmental, research, and archival information sets about hundreds of thousands of archaeological sites. Although DINAA links archaeological information at a scale that was not feasible even a decade ago, its greater strengths come from a commitment to...
Current Trends in Archaeoacoustics (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeoacoustics: Sound, Hearing, and Experience in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, archaeological research has trended toward the exploration of the experiences of past people, particularly through engagement with the senses, seeking new methodologies and associated theories to develop this understanding. Sounds and auditory experiences occurred ubiquitously throughout time and within all...
Cyberfeminism, Virtual Worlds, and Resisting the Feminization of Digital Archaeology (2016)
In feminist technoscience, feminist technologies are those which are good for the oppressed. Cyberfeminists view online worlds as one such technology; although many question how they can support social transformation. The answer to this dilemma for many cyberfeminists requires that we resist embedding new technologies with entrenched hierarchies of power. After a brief review of how hierarchical thinking is embedded in some familiar technologies, I examine the possibilities virtual technologies...