Quantitative and Spatial Analysis (Other Keyword)
126-150 (234 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An increasing number of studies are demonstrating the advantages and potential of 3D data acquisition and analysis techniques for documenting and understanding drivers of morphological variability in lithic assemblages. Applications of 3D geometric morphometrics, for instance, are challenging and refining traditional classifications and promise to open new...
Looking through the Glass: How Large-Scale XRF Obsidian Sourcing Has Expanded Our View of Late Pre-Hispanic Regional Networks in the U.S. Southwest (2019)
This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past three decades, the Geoarchaeological XRF Lab, founded and directed by Steve Shackley, has defined and established unique chemical fingerprints for nearly all of the obsidian sources used by Native Americans in the pre-Hispanic U.S. Southwest. Sources and sub-source localities can be reliably identified...
Los Antepasados Eran Más Valientes: Ancient and Modern Movement in the Sierra Sur Mountains (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People living in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountains still travel largely on foot, especially where cars are impossible or when they are moving their livestock from one place to another. Prior to the widespread ownership of cars today, travel by foot was even more common and was the only mode of transportation in the prehispanic era....
Low Altitude Aerial Photography in Montezuma Canyon (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Montezuma Canyon, San Juan County, Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Photogrammetric imagery, spatial modeling, and resulting high-resolution orthomosaics can be used to identify potential excavation areas, previously unrecorded architecture and other archaeological features, and to verify and update existing mapdata and site information. This paper discusses the methods and results from...
Machine Learning for Chronology Building in Regional-Scale Synthesis (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. Chronlogical control is essential for regional-scale research in order to establish contemporaneity or temporal sequences among spatially distributed assemblages. Archaeology has benefitted from advances in radiometric dating methods, as well as statistical protocols for combining dates to achive greater precision age...
Machine Learning R-CNN Identification of the Entirety of the Southwest Regional Road Network (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The United States Geologic Survey is intermittently releasing publicly available 1-meter resolution lidar of the contiguous United States through the 3-Dimensional Elevation Project. Over the past several years, large sections of lidar across southeast Utah, southwest Colorado, New Mexico, and small portions of Arizona have been released—creating an...
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?...
Managing the Effects of Climate Change and Foraging Risk through Dietary Portfolio Diversity, an Example from 13,000 years of Human-Environment Interactions on the Great Plains of North America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food security and risk management are prominent contemporary global challenges, with ~795 million people undernourished worldwide. Climate change is projected to affect the availability, accessibility and stability of food sources, further exacerbating global malnutrition, but this is not a novel human challenge. Food security risk...
Mapping Seasonally Inundated Wetlands within the Ancient Maya Center of El Pilar (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya center of El Pilar is a mid-sized settlement nestled on the ecotone dividing the central Peten and Belize river valley. With nearly half of the site consisting of seasonally inundated wetlands, defining the extent and nature of these areas is essential before interpreting El Pilar’s settlement patterns. Remotely sensed lidar and...
Mapping Teotihuacan’s Inception: Patlachique Phase Ceramics Distribution on the Lidar Map (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Patlachique Phase (100 BCE–ca.100 CE) is underrepresented in the archaeological record since most sites were probably covered by the Classic Period city of Teotihuacan (200–550 CE). This phase likely represents the beginning of the urbanization process in the Teotihuacan Valley, during a period of exponential growth seen in Central Mexico. We examined the...
Maya Monumental ‘Boom’: Spatial Development, Rank Ordering, and Planning Considerations at Alabama, East-Central Belize (2018)
In the 1980s, archaeological investigations by the Point Placencia Archaeological Project (PPAP) noted the rapid, single-phase development of monumental construction at the Maya site of Alabama in the Stann Creek District. Though never fully investigated by PPAP, this rapid, ‘boom-like’ development during the late facet of the Late Classic to Terminal Classic periods is being pursued in current investigations by the Stann Creek Regional Archaeology Project (SCRAP). This presentation, by...
Maya Ossuaries: Body Processing and Collective Memory in the Terminal Classic (2018)
The allocation of space for the deceased is an integral component of understanding the relationship between a community and its mortuary practices. This paper explores how Maya ossuaries, or deposits with the commingled remains of multiple individuals, form a distinct body processing method that increases in frequency during the Terminal and Postclassic period in the Northern Maya lowlands. Data from salvage excavations of a Terminal Classic disturbed ossuary in the archaeological zone of...
Measurement Variability in a Collection of Modern Gazelle (Gazella gazella) Skeletons and its Archaeological Implications (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Linear skeletal measurements have long been harnessed by zooarchaeologists to differentiate animals by taxon, breed, age, and sex, to investigate domestication and animal management strategies and the impact of factors such as climate change and anthropogenic activity. However, due to equifinality, interpreting archaeological body size data remains...
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...
A Methodology for Comparing and Evaluating Seriation Algorithms Applied to Archaeological Data (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. According to recent literature, correspondence analysis is the method of choice for frequency seriation. However, this does not consider the effects of data heterogeneity or typology on the orderings produced by this method. This relates to a more fundamental issue of how to evaluate the effects of heterogeneity and typology on seriation results, as well as...
Methods, Models, and Movement: Examining Multiple Trace Element Dataset to Explore Past Land use Dynamics (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Differential use of obsidian sources by pre-contact peoples has been used to infer mobility patterns and occupations in the Absaroka mountains, Wyoming. Identifying sources of obsidian involves measuring the relative abundances of trace elements using eXRF and analyzing clusters to differentiate sources. Using a large dataset of 1,842 obsidian artifacts,...
Micro-habitat Production in the Late Woodland Period (2018)
This paper presents the results of recent statistical analyses focused on relative plant species distributions among six Princess Point sites in Late Woodland Southern Ontario and explores potential markers of micro-habitat production in the region.
Modeling the Dynamics of Diversification (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Quantifying diversity is one of the most fundamental components of both a scientific and evolutionary approach to archaeology. While archaeologists have spent decades painstakingly describing diversity, we continue to lack a comprehensive understanding on broader evolutionary patterns of...
Modeling the Milpa-Cycle: A GIS-Based Approach to Envisioning Ancient Maya Land Use and Traditional Agricultural Practices (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities: Modeling Food Production and Land Use in Tropical Urban Environments" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traditional ecological knowledge from living Maya farmers informs us of a storied heritage of agricultural production within the tropical Maya lowlands that traces its lineage to the development and height of ancient Maya civilization. In studying the Maya milpa-cycle, a 20-year...
A Mound or Not a Mound? How Rasters and Point Clouds Can Help with False Positive Identification (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will discuss the benefits of using different combinations of rasters for large scale survey and the functional usage of viewing problematic mounds in the point cloud to weed away the false positives. Maya sites around Mesoamerica have and will be scanned with LiDAR. Since the turn of the century, technology has improved and now the data...
Moving in New Ways, Making New Places: Novelty and the Politics of Place Making (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tracing the movement of people archaeologically is a challenge, especially since the deconstruction of the direct association between people groups and material culture. This paper approaches material culture and spatial practice as the constitution and negotiation of social relations. I...
A Multi-temporal Analysis of Archaeological Site Destruction Using Landsat Satellite Data and Machine Learning, Moche Valley, Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The destruction of archaeological sites and the loss of archaeological landscapes remains a global concern as populations and urban areas continue to expand. Archaeological sites are not only significant to local communities, national identities, and modern tourist economies but also provide critical knowledge of past sociocultural interactions, settlement...
A New Methodology for Understanding How Bone Wears Using 3D Surface Texture Analysis (2018)
Use-wear analysis provides a tool for studying traces produced on animal bone during manufacture and use. Often, these analyses have been qualitative, describing the surface two-dimensionally, and have led to inconsistencies between researchers. Studies have focused on interpreting final traces and lack a foundation in understanding how the traces developed. Here, we propose a new methodology for studying bone surface traces that will reduce the problems of unreliable and unreplicable results in...
A New Tool for Forensic Geoarchaeology: Sediment Fingerprinting with Geochemistry for Homicide Investigations (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Forensic Archaeology: Research & Practice" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sediment fingerprinting by elemental analysis has been an important analytical tool in the environmental sciences to help explain sediment movement and deposition in water bodies and other catchments. Related techniques have also been used in many archaeological investigations to aid in ancient activity area analysis. However, this technique has...
Of Palisades and Postmolds (2018)
The fieldwork conducted in Tyler Bastian’s 1969-1970 salvage trench at Biggs Ford revealed a unique window into two Late Woodland villages, a Montgomery Complex and a Keyser Complex. The post mold patterns observed in the initial analysis of the trench may indicate the footprints of both complexes. Linear post mold arcs and a ring of pits may be consistent with other known Montgomery Complex sites, namely the Winslow site in Montgomery County. Additionally, post mold patterns in the extreme...