Remote Sensing/Geophysics (Other Keyword)
176-200 (212 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stephen Douglas Houston was drawn to archaeology and ancient scripts from a young age, fascinated by the rune stones of his mother’s native Sweden. While he is most widely seen as an epigrapher to outsiders, Mayanists recognize that he is, in fact, a world class field archaeologist that knows...
The Submerged Cypress Forest and the Paleolandscape of the Gulf of Mexico (2018)
Submerged Paleo-geologic features with probability for associated prehistoric sites on the Gulf of Mexico shelf include coastal plain and fluvial valley-fill deposits (e.g. terrace and floodplains) preserved landward of the 60-m bathymetric contour, the approximate late Pleistocene (~12,000 ka) shoreline location. A site ~15 km offshore Alabama was discovered with exposed remains of a previously-buried bald cypress forest with stumps in growth position rooted in an organic-rich paleosol. It has...
Testing Geophysical Anomalies Using In Situ Shallow Subsurface Spectroscopy and Soil Magnetic Susceptibility Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Quivira Revisited" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2015 the National Park Service’s Archaeological Prospection Workshop was held at the Tobias Site (14RC8). Students and instructors evaluated the site using a variety of non-invasive prospection methods ranging from landscape-level LiDAR analysis to high sample density subsurface geophysical survey. The evaluation identified buried features and patterning within the...
Testing Google Earth Engine for Remote Sensing in Archaeology: Case Studies from Faynan, Jordan (2018)
Satellite imagery and remote sensing have secured a place in the archaeological toolbox, but the scale of satellite derived data often results in large datasets with individual image tiles consisting of many gigabytes. Consequently, performing complex analyses on satellite data can be computationally intensive to a prohibitive degree. Google Earth Engine (GEE), an in-development, cloud-based platform for visualizing/analyzing satellite imagery, affords a solution for researchers with limited...
Testing Multiple Geophysical Methods at Fremont Archaeological Sites (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ephemeral nature of many Fremont habitation sites has made site identification extremely difficult for Fremont archaeologists today. Unlike the standing and partially exposed ruins of their ancestral Puebloan neighbors, the Fremont left little evidence of their habitation across the region. Those that remain include structures now buried below the...
Testing the Potential of UAV-based Lidar survey in the Lion Mountain Area of West Central New Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of lidar as a survey tool has revealed vast areas of past human activity in parts of the world with dense vegetative cover. However, its applications have not been explored to the same degree in areas with less vegetation and good surface visibility, such as that of the American Southwest. Ongoing research for the Lion Mountain Archaeology Project...
There Are Holes in Our Argument: Karst Landforms and Multispecies Flourishing in Northeastern Yucatan, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the development of agriculture and society in northeastern Yucatán, Mexico, drawing on evidence from lidar imaging, paleoethnobotany, and isotopic studies. We focus on geological features known as dolines, sinkholes, or rejolladas—round, low areas that dot the...
Thermal Identification of Groundwater Discharges within Saline Lagoons Surrounding Vista Alegre, Quintana Roo, Mexico (2018)
The Maya port and site of Vista Alegre carried political and trade importance in the Terminal Classic to Early Postclassic periods. Located in the Laguna Yalahau of northern Quintana Roo, Mexico, the site is built on a small and low elevation island surrounded by mangrove. Inland from the site are freshwater wetlands (sabanas), while the near-shore waters of the restricted circulation lagoon are hypersaline. A significant research question is how the inhabitants of Vista Alegre accessed potable...
Through a Scanner...Darkly? LiDAR, Survey, and Mapping at the Ancient Maya Center El Pilar (2018)
Survey at the ancient Maya center El Pilar, along the border between Belize and Guatemala, has incorporated LiDAR imagery since 2013, allowing expansive – yet targeted – coverage of settlement beyond the monumental core. Successive field seasons have revealed a complex picture of landscape modification, resource extraction, and settlement concentration in different micro-environmental zones around the city center. Our fieldwork in 2017 had three foci: 1) explore and map the Amatal Supercluster,...
Ties to the Ancestors: Examining a Late Classic Household at Las Ruinas de Arenal, Belize (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There has been a long history of settlement and household archaeology in the Belize River valley that has added significantly to our understanding of everyday people in the Maya lowlands. Recent studies that include LiDAR provide a broader landscape perspective. LiDAR can also be useful in determining labor investment in domestic architecture through...
Toward an Automated Model for Archaeological Site Detection in Eastern Botswana, a Clustering Method (2018)
This paper is an effort to create a predictive model for archaeological sites in an area of Eastern Botswana. With a rather arid climate, much of Botswana’s ground surface (and archaeology) is easily visible to airborne and spaceborne sensors. Without sufficient training data for supervised classification, an iterative spectral clustering method was used to group spectrally similar pixels from multispectral imagery into a large number of spectrally distinct but unknown classes. By visually...
Toward the Remote Identification of Stone Tools in Submerged, Buried Contexts Using Acoustics (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the inception of geophysical survey, archaeologists have longed for the ability to detect the presence or absence of artifacts in buried contexts remotely. This ability is particularly desirable underwater, where accuracy in site location and efficiency in excavation are paramount given the expense and logistical burden associated with performing...
Tracing Early Farming Communities in Southern Mozambique by Geophysical Prospection: Current State of Activities, Part 1 (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in Mozambique: Current Issues and Topics in Archaeology and Heritage Management" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In southern Africa, the appearance of pottery was first recognized in the context of Early Farming Communities (EFC) about 2000 BP. Increasingly, pottery can be linked to hunter-gatherers; therefore, southern Africa stands out as a place to investigate the contact between these two communities....
Tracing Early Farming Communities in Southern Mozambique by Geophysical Prospection: Current State of Activities, Part 2 (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in Mozambique: Current Issues and Topics in Archaeology and Heritage Management" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In southern Africa, the appearance of pottery was first recognized in the context of Early Farming Communities (EFC) about 2000 BP. Increasingly, pottery can be linked to hunter-gatherers, therefore southern Africa stands out as a place to investigate the contact between these two communities. In...
Twenty-First-Century Archeological Geophysics in the National Park Service (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Midwest Archeological Center (National Park Service) has long been at the forefront of geophysical surveys for archeological research and heritage management in the United States. Since the Center’s pioneering efforts to showcase the practicality of geophysical methods nearly 50 years ago, our use of ground-based surveys has become indispensable for...
Unseen Aztalan: Preliminary Results of a Geomagnetic Survey of the Aztalan Enclosure (2018)
Lynne Goldstein’s compilation of a GIS-based map of the Aztalan site, portraying all investigations through 1996, visually integrated almost two centuries of archaeological work at the site in southern Wisconsin. Lynne’s map made two things startlingly clear. First, decades of excavations were not all referenced to a common datum and few had left visible surface indications, making it difficult to relocate earlier excavations and avoid re-excavating disturbed contexts. Second, just 10% of the...
The Use and Benefit of Integrated Geophysical Survey in the Study of an Irish Early Medieval Site Rath Maol (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper addresses the value of an integrated geophysical survey approach, which includes the application of GPR, DGPS, and magnetic gradiometry, to identify archaeological areas of occupation non-invasively. This approach was applied to RathMaol, as part of a larger ongoing research project,...
The Use of Geophysics to Image Structures at Broyhill Mound (31CW8) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geophysical surveys were conducted at the Broyhill Mound, a protohistoric late Burke village in the foothills of the Southern Appalachians ~30 km northeast from Fort San Juan/Berry (1566-1568), to guide investigations. The site was first discovered by John Rogan for Cyrus Thomas in 1883, and then rediscovered by Richard Polhemus in 1964 and Appalachian State...
Use of Human Remains Detection Dogs to Find Unmarked Precontact Human Burials in the Ohio Valley (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Canine Resources for the Archaeologist" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Remote sensing techniques, including magnetic survey and ground penetrating radar, are commonly used in archaeology as part of cultural resource management projects. In this presentation, we share our experience using a complimentary and nascent remote sensing technique to locate human remains on archaeological sites, human remains detection (HRD)...
The Use of Primary Sources in Plantation Archaeology: the Case Study of Hacienda La Esperanza. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Primary Sources and the Design of Research Projects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research at Hacienda La Esperanza, a nineteenth century sugar plantation in the municipality of Manatí, Puerto Rico, was conducted to study the material culture of its enslaved population and document their unwritten experiences. The use of primary sources proved indispensable during the early research design stages of the project....
Using LiDAR and Environmental Suitability Models to Predict Probable Locations of Ancient Settlements in Manabí, Ecuador (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, LIDAR has gained popularity among archaeological researchers for its capability to reveal ancient settlement features hidden beneath dense vegetation coverage in heavily forested areas. More often, these studies have revealed undocumented monumental architecture and in some cases modified landscapes such as agricultural terraces, canals, and...
Using LiDAR to Map an Ancient Purépecha Water Management System in ArcGIS (2018)
Recent applications of LiDAR technology at the Late Postclassic city of Angamuco, located in the heartland of the ancient Purépecha Empire in modern day Michoacan, Mexico are allowing for the identification and analysis of urban features in innovative ways. A complex system of constructed water management features consisting of reservoirs, sunken plazas, and connective canals were a vital form of infrastructure that were required for the movement of water across the dynamic landscape upon which...
Using Multispectral Drone Imagery for Identification of Prehispanic Agricultural Features (2018)
In recent years, the use of multispectral satellite imagery has become an increasingly viable option for archaeological site detection and classification. Nevertheless, the high costs and relatively low resolution of multispectral data present challenges for local-scale archaeological feature detection. In this presentation, we will examine the advantages and limitations of using UAV aerial multispectral imagery as a means of local-scale feature detection. We compare results of remote sensing...
Using Remote Sensing to Re-evaluate Prehistoric Land Use in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Remote sensing has been used extensively the past several years to study prehistoric land use in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Previous land use models for Chaco predict economic activities such as agriculture and water management near some of the major sites within the canyon, and these models have been critical to understanding how land use contributed to the...
Uso de Dispositivos Open Hardware en Proyectos Arqueológicos en México (2019)
This is an abstract from the "La Práctica Arqueológica en México en Tiempos de Crisis: Escenarios, Problemáticas Claves, Actores, Acciones y Propuestas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Desde sus orígenes de relativamente baja tecnología, la arqueología ha evolucionado en una disciplina altamente tecnologizada, que emplea instrumentos para localizar, caracterizar y exhibir al sitios y yacimientos. Los arqueólogos con acceso a tecnología novedosa...