digital archaeology (Other Keyword)
226-250 (389 Records)
Surface assemblages play an important role in understanding human behavior. However, modern erosional processes—specifically flowing water—can limit the behavioral inferences that can be gained from surface assemblages by transporting materials from their original discard sites. The influence of these processes can be observed in the size distribution and condition of surface lithic assemblages. The topography and geomorphology of the landscape heavily dictates the degree to which fluvial...
The Living Archive of Çatalhöyük (LAC): Providing Big Data Laboratories as Open Environments for Archaeological Research (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In archaeology data are stored in ways that reflect the strategies of research while conventional data repositories tend to freeze the original databases within their initial storage logic. In contrast, the interpretation of primary evidence changes during a project's lifecycle, and it becomes difficult for later researchers with different research questions,...
Living Data: A Digital Data Collection and Management System for Landscape Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As more and more data are born digital, archaeologists increasingly focus on operationalizing and refining data models, workflows, and practices. Important considerations include not only whether data will be useable for their intended purpose but also whether data generated by archaeological projects will be findable, accessible, interoperable, and...
Low-Cost Collection Digitization: Streamlining Photogrammetric Methodologies (2015)
In recent years, it has become possible to rapidly digitize artifacts into three-dimensional (3D) form. The creation of sharable 3D datasets has the potential to increase collaborative efforts and collection access on a large scale. Despite this, archaeologists have struggled to employ an accurate, quick, and transportable solution to collecting data for model generation in field contexts. Photogrammetric modeling is an ideal low-cost solution to be explored, requiring minimal equipment, and...
Machine Learning the Visual Rhetoric of the Trade in Human Remains (2018)
There is a thriving online trade, and collector community, that seeks specimens of numerous categories of human remains. This commerce is facilitated by posts on new social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, and, until recently, eBay and operates within a complex ethical and legal landscape. This presentation will share key results of ongoing work to data mine these online markets on both new social media and multi-lingual e-commerce platforms. In particular, we are interested in the...
Making Archaeological Data Publicly Accessible through the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (2018)
Scientific research conducted during the process of environmental review has been publicly and openly criticized by governmental officials in recent months. Not only does this represent an official contestation of the value of this research in the public eye, it seeks to undermine the credibility and legitimacy of science as a discipline. The research in question is federally mandated, and in the case of Section 106/Title 54, exists to avoid unnecessary harm to historic properties. If we seek to...
Making Data Free, Immediate, and Having Equitable Access: How Federal and State Agencies Work to Meet OSTP Governance through Responsible Curation and Preservation (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the call from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to make federally-funded research openly and immediately available, many archaeologists, archivists, and CRM professionals in the U.S. are left wondering how this affects their research and ability to preserve and protect their data. Most affected by this governance are state and...
Making meaning from 3D models and 3D prints: A case study using archaeological objects from Southwestern Ontario (2017)
3D technologies provide a powerful mechanism for documenting, sharing, and engaging with archaeological information. While the products of these tools (including 3D models and 3D prints) are often treated as neutral objects, they should be identified as mediated and interpretive entities. How people experience, perceive, and value these archaeological "copies" in relation to original archaeological material is still relatively unknown. This poster provides a localised case study from...
Making Quality Interpretations in the Ever-Expanding World of Digital Data (2018)
Digital data collection is often efficient, cost-effective, and a tremendous accompaniment to other archaeological collection methods like excavation. Furthermore, digital data can be used to generate measurements that are simply not possible with analog data. However, as computing technology continues to become faster, more powerful, and cheaper, and the ease of collecting massive amounts of data increases, it is fair to ask: Are our abilities to analyze and interpret these data keeping up?...
Making the Most of Salmon Pueblo’s Enormous Dataset: The SPARC Project (2018)
The ruins of Salmon Pueblo were excavated by Cynthia Irwin-Williams, her staff, and students in the 1970s. A huge archive of material culture, photographs, excavation records, and analytical data was produced documenting Salmon’s Chacoan and post-Chacoan occupations. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Salmon Pueblo Archaeological Research Collection (SPARC) Project was created with the goal of making the enormous Salmon dataset available to scholars through an...
Managing Digital Data at the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology: Challenges and Directions (2018)
The North Carolina Office of State Archaeology (OSA) was created by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1973 to coordinate and implement a statewide archaeological preservation program. Central to this program is the OSA’s management of records, including those documenting the more than 50,000 archaeological sites located in the state’s 100 counties, and a library of nearly 8,000 associated reports. The OSA Research Center curates tens of thousands of artifacts and their associated records...
The Map Results of an Integrated UAV-Based Remote Sensing Platform in the Northern Yucatán (2018)
We report the results of testing a UAV-borne LiDAR and multispectral mapping system for archaeological mapping and modeling at the city of Mayapán, Mexico, located 40km south of modern Mérida. Mayapán was the largest Postclassic political capital and was one of the most densely nucleated of all Maya cities. The initial test is in an area adjacent to the south side of Mayapán’s monumental center. Previous research indicates the existence of a dense and complex system of residential and public...
Mapping Marronage and Afro-Indigenous Relationality in Central Peninsular Florida (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Seeking Freedom in the Borderlands: Archaeological Perspectives on Maroon Societies in Florida" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following investigations at the early nineteenth-century African/Black Seminole settlement of Pilaklikaha (“Abraham’s Old Town”), Florida has emerged as a key space for examining the complex intersections between archaeologies of marronage and Afro-Indigenous relationality. Beginning with...
Mapping Marronnage: Creating, Managing, and Visualizing Archival Datasets (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the nineteenth century, captive Africans in Guyane, a French colony and overseas territory in northeastern South America, increasingly sought their own freedom leading up to definitive abolition in 1848. Colonial administrators recognized the practice as a problem and began...
Mapping the Historic Baptist Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In August 2023, an archaeologist from Michigan State University and participants living and vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, documented and mapped the remnants of a 19th century Baptist Camp Meeting site in Oak Bluffs. Utilized by Baptist groups for weeklong revivals from 1875 until ca. 1930. The Baptist Temple...
The Maryland Archaeological Synthesis Project: One State’s Solution to Archaeology’s Crushing Gray Literature Problem (2018)
Since passage of the National Historic Preservation Act fifty-two years ago a growing body of valuable data has been generated by state agencies, CRM professionals, and preservation officers. Unfortunately, this data is usually trapped in an archaic paper-based format, restricted geographically to a single state archive. All too often the data is brought to light only to be "reburied" in the SHPO’s library where it may be largely inaccessible to researchers scattered throughout the country. This...
Materialization of Time, Space, Nature, and Societies Denoted by New Lidar Maps at Teotihuacan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Landscapes and Cosmic Cities out of Eurasia: Transdisciplinary Studies with New Lidar Mapping" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Primary archaeological data indicate that the current reconstruction of the city of Teotihuacan was apparently built with a master plan around AD 200. Three major monuments were harmoniously integrated into a rigorously calculated city layout with functional and/or symbolic units...
Measures of Influence: Volumetric Assessment of Earthworks at Angel Mounds Using Drone-Based Lidar (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Angel Mounds State Historic Site, a Middle Mississippian fortified mound center along the Ohio River, is home to 11 man-made earthworks which make up the largest known archaeological site in Indiana. Angel’s occupation coincides with the regional changes in social organization that characterize Mississippian society. Many archaeologists have discussed mound...
Measuring Past Networks of Cultural Transmission: The Haskett Projectile Point (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology from Western North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Advances in technology such as 3D digital scanning and spatial analysis software have provided archaeologists with novel data. Specifically, these methods increase the researcher’s ability to measure artifact morphology and past networks of cultural transmission, to potentially track the movement of past peoples and ideas through space and time....
Methods for High-Resolution Visualization Of 3D Surfaces (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Modern methods of 3D characterization, like photogrammetry and structured light scanning, can capture high-resolution models of inscribed surfaces. Visualization and enhancement of surface details on these models can be limited by the computational requirements for manipulating high face and vertex counts. We present several methods for working around...
Minimizing Distractions and Focusing on What Matters: Using Autonomous Drone Flight Technology to Examine Architecture across the Circum-Titicaca Basin (Puno, Peru) (2018)
Drones have tremendously influenced how archaeologists can capture data, hailed as particularly "efficient" tools for our field. Such is the case, for example, in projects which aim to produce highly detailed basemaps useful for various site-level GIS analyses. However, despite radical developments within the past few years which have significantly improved accessibility and in-field usability, an under-represented reality is the unexpected challenges these technologies almost always present in...
Mining Data, Protecting Historic Landscapes, and Understanding the Past (2016)
Forty years ago Bill Lipe dared archaeologists to fundamentally change their views about archaeological practice. We were like miners, exploiting a non-renewable resource. If we were to have a future we would need to practice conservation as well as salvage, and education as well as preservation. Lipe published his 1974 Kiva article just as CRM and modern government archaeology were coming into being. Today, we live in a fundamentally different archaeological culture: there are four times as...
Minoans at Aghios Nikolaos? Preliminary Results of the Khavania Topographical and Architectural Mapping Project (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the preliminary results of the Khavania Topographical and Architectural Mapping Project (2019), whose primary objective was to document all natural and anthropogenic features at the coastal site of Khavania, East Crete. Exploration of the eastern and southern shores of the Mirabello Bay has produced abundant evidence for cultural...
Mississippian Modes of Exchange: Documenting Shifting Networks and Distribution at Ancient Cahokia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study investigates changes in distribution at the ancient Mississippian site of Cahokia using social network analysis. Over the course of its history, Cahokia transformed from a small village to a large macroregional center. This transformation was accompanied by a marked increase in institutional complexity, specialization, rank/class differences,...
Mobile App Development at the Archaeology Data Service (2015)
The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) continually explores new ways to make the data we hold more useful and accessible. One of these avenues has been the development of a mobile app called "Archaeology Britain", which we recently created in partnership with the British Library. This paper outlines the development of this partnership, and our attempt to create an iPad app with unique and interesting content from both organisations. The app presents antiquarian drawings, paintings and maps for some...