digital archaeology (Other Keyword)
301-325 (389 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While members of the communities living near or on archaeological sites have frequently been hired around the world to dig on archaeological excavations, they have very rarely participated in the recording or documentation of those excavations. They have played even less of a role in designing the structures of either paper or electronic data...
Pulling it Together: Collecting, Collating, and Analyzing Quantitative Data from Written Reports using R (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Due to the nature of long-term archaeological investigations, data collection and curation methods change over time. This means that data can end up in several physical and digital locations, making the analysis of evidence challenging if it was collected years apart or by several investigators. In Lowland Maya archaeology, annual reports are required to...
Quality of Life Changes in an Ancient Maya Community: Longitudinal Perspectives from Altar de Sacrificios, Guatemala (2018)
Inequality is a prominent and persistent feature of all large-scale human societies that has significant impacts on everyday life. Variation in material wealth and social capital as well as differential access to specialized knowledge and other resources directly impacts household quality of life (QOL) within ancient and contemporary communities. For the ancient Maya, the establishment of political institutions centered on divine rulership significantly contributed to QOL changes during the...
R-Based Solutions for Synthesizing Cultural Resource Survey Data to Assess Changing Land-Use Patterns in the Okanagan-Wenatchee National Forest, WA (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research has benefited from decades of site-specific projects, regional comparisons, and theory building from case studies. However, recent research themes concerning the emergence of complex social-ecological systems and long-term land-use legacies require new approaches to archaeological data. Large-scale syntheses of archaeological,...
Rapid Increase in Production of Symbolic Artifacts after 45,000 Years Ago Is Not a Consequence of Taphonomic Bias (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Researchers have long been aware of an apparently rapid increase ca. 40,000–45,000 BP in the frequency of “symbolic” artifacts in the Old World paleolithic record. However, some hypothesize that if not for taphonomic loss the data would instead show a gradual increase in such artifacts’ frequency during the Middle Stone...
Reassembling an Assemblage to Examine the Origins of Race-Based Enslavement at Flowerdew Hundred Plantation (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Flowerdew Hundred, a 1,000-acre plantation tract located on the south side of the James River in Virginia, was the focus of decades of excavations by the College of William and Mary and University of California, Berkeley. Three Flowerdew sites are among the earliest seventeenth-century settlements occupied by enslaved...
Recent Remote Sensing and Digital Documentation at Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, we present the results of a program of remote sensing and the digital documentation of the art and architecture of the Maya site of Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico. An aerial lidar survey performed in 2014 has aided in creating a more accurate map of the site. Detailed photogrammetry and ground-based liar, performed in the area open for tourism,...
Rediscovering the Andersson Collection: 100 Years Later (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Johan Gunner Andersson’s collection of artifacts excavated from archaeological sites in northern China has been residing, largely unstudied, in the storage rooms of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, as well as other institutions, for nearly 100 years. During this time a variety of inventory systems, loans, reorganizations, and moves has led to...
Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most archaeological investigations in the United States and other countries must comply with preservation laws, if on government property or supported by government funding. Academic and cultural resource management (CRM) studies have explored various social, temporal, and environmental contexts and produce an ever-increasing volume of archaeological data....
Reflectance Transformation Imaging: New Methods in Documenting Preclassic Maya Graffiti from Holtun, Guatemala (2018)
In the late 19th century, explorers identified graffiti etched in stucco walls of residences, palaces, and temples in the Maya Lowlands. By the mid-20th century, scholars acknowledged that the ancient Maya produced these incised images. Today, archaeologists struggle with documenting these instances of graffiti with precision and accuracy, often relying solely on to-scale line drawings to best represent the graffitied image they see before them. These images can be complex, multilayered, and...
Reflections on 30 Years of Digital Archaeology: Where Do We Go from Here? (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Transformations in Professional Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past three decades, archaeology has experienced a paradigm shift with the integration of digital recording and publishing methodologies. This “paper” critically examines whether, in our pursuit of technological advancements, we have remained true to the core principles of archaeological ethics. Are we on the brink of a digital dark...
Regional Analysis in Perspective: An Epistemological Assessment for Paleo-Inuit Archaeology (2018)
The increasing accessibility of archaeological data from the Canadian Arctic has promoted a recent influx of macro-scale analyses. Drawing insights from our ongoing research project in the Foxe Basin region, we address some challenges regarding the synthesis of archaeological information, especially as it pertains to Paleo-Inuit studies. We discuss the importance of data quality and address issues of variability in occupation density, duration, and seasonality, both at the household and...
The Remains of the Transcontinental Air Mail System (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The period in American history from 1924 to the 1940s represents a pivotal time for transcontinental aviation, making it possible for mail to travel from New York City to San Francisco in 30 hours. Transcontinental aviation is a feat that had not been possible prior to the establishment of a system of lighted beacons and concrete navigational arrows. The...
Remote Sensing of Constructed Landscapes in Northern Guatemala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya sites of San Bartolo and Xultun, Guatemala, provide compelling evidence for ancient Maya agricultural interventions and shifting perspectives about the regional ecological landscape. The first line of evidence is visual: murals there catalog political and religious...
Representations of Looting and Bad Practices as Entertainment (2015)
Representations of archaeology in films and television have been historically problematic, frequently emphasizing bad practices, shoddy scholarship and ethically questionable professional behavior. In video games, however, there is an additional dimension of experience as the user in effect commits the acts actively instead of viewing them passively. By looking critically at the modern "adventure" game, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, examples of encouragement of looting, creating a false object...
Respecting the Past and Protecting the Future: Strategies for Implementing Digital Best Practices in Historical Archaeology Research on Military Installations (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. In Cultural Resources Management, many archaeological survey projects are undertaken through contract services provided to regional federal clients with large-scale resource evaluation needs. In the case of military properties, each installation maintains SOPs and curatorial operations to serve the needs of...
Rethinking Assemblages in the Digital Age (2017)
Archaeologists have long drawn on technological advances from other disciplines to create new ways of visualizing and classifying data. Relational databases in particular have been a cornerstone of archaeological inquiry into material assemblages, whether sets of artifacts and their attributes or constellations of sites across regions. But how have new technologies (e.g., spatial, three-dimensional, mobile, and digitally collaborative platforms) enhanced achaeologists' ability to trace, and...
Roads and Rivers: The Importance of Regional Transportation Networks for Early Urbanization in Central Italy (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient regional routes were vital for interactions between settlements and deeply influenced the development of past societies and their “complexification” (e.g., urbanization). For example, terrestrial routes required resources and inter-settlement cooperation to be established and maintained, and can be regarded as an...
A Role for the Machine, or, Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, and Some Humans in the Loop Studying the Human Remains Trade (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Human Remains in the Marketplace and Beyond: Myths and Realities of Monitoring, Grappling With, and Anthropologizing the Illicit Trade in a Post-Harvard World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human remains are traded openly across social media and the wider web. The posts that accompany these texts are sometimes graphic, often disrespectful, and normally afford no dignity to the dead. The imagery can similarly show no...
The Role of Federal-Academic Partnerships in Training the Next Generation of Archaeologists: A Case Study from the Ocala National Forest (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Heritage Sites at the Intersection of Landscape, Memory, and Place: Archaeology, Heritage Commemoration, and Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ocala National Forest is the largest in the southern United States. Its 400,000 acres is home to 14,000 years of human history. In 2019, authors Dysart and Gonzalez-Tennant developed a multiyear project centering on an iterative approach to predictive modeling,...
RTI Photography inside a Hohokam Great House (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Vanishing Treasures Program: Celebrating 20 Years of National Park Service Historic Preservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Great House at Casa Grande Ruins National Monument is a monumental 11 room, three/four story structure made of puddled mud "caliche" that has been called "the pinnacle of Hohokam architectural achievement" and is significant for its high degree of preservation. The building is home...
RTI Photography Part of a Greater Whole in Archaeological Documentation Methodology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Digital photography has ushered in many new methods of documenting archaeological resources in the past 15 years. Many of these new methods have been flawed because of a misunderstanding of the potential of the digital technologies and the analog methods they replace. Reflective Transformation Imaging (RTI) photography is a relatively new technique to document...
The Search for Jamestown’s 1617 Church: How Digital Technologies are Providing New Insights into an Old Site (2018)
Digital technologies are changing fundamental approaches to archaeological excavation and analysis. The Jamestown Rediscovery project to examine James Fort, the first successful English settlement in North America, has been ongoing for more than 20 years. Recently the team has been working on re-excavating the site of three of Jamestown’s 17th-century churches, the earliest of which is significant for having been the site of the first representative assembly meeting in English America in 1619....
Searching for Reflexivity in Digital Archaeology and Heritage (2017)
The general enthusiasm for all things digital applied to archaeological method and research makes teaching a course on digital archaeology tailor-made for the kinds of experiential learning approaches archaeology does so well within the academy. That enthusiasm facilitates an archaeologically creative engagement with digital technologies and information management that, at its best, re-imagines the archaeological enterprise and advances stunning new research applications. But what is sometimes...
Searching for the Domestic at Chavín: Integrating 20-Plus years of Archaeology in La Banda (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Chavín de Huántar’s Contribution to Understanding the Central Andean Formative: Results and Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Even after more than a century of research at Chavín de Huántar, two key questions remain about who the ceremonial center was built for and who it was built by. As research attention has largely focused on pilgrims, priests, and peer polities, the labor force and craft specialists...