Quantitative and Spatial Analysis (Other Keyword)
51-75 (234 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Differential recovery refers to the ways that faunal assemblages are sampled from the archaeological record. Its effects can be pernicious when interpreting data from multiple assemblages. As such, the topic is a mainstay in contemporary zooarchaeological research; however, in the U.S. Southwest differential recovery has received less attention. One reason...
Dig Until You Find Blood: A Spatial Investigation of Menstrual Seclusion Practice at Deir el-Medina (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnographic investigations into menstrual seclusion practices worldwide show that investigating these behaviors is not only fruitful, but also integral in understanding a community’s ideology and social structuring. Texts dating to the New Kingdom and Demotic periods suggest that ancient Egyptians engaged in a menstrual seclusion practice that included a...
Digging Deeper into Tsenacommacah: A Temporal and Spatial Analysis of the Pre-Contact Archaeological Record at Virginia’s Flowerdew Hundred Plantation (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades of archaeological work at Flowerdew Hundred, a tobacco plantation located in the Chesapeake region of Virginia, have focused primarily on its 17th-century occupation by English elites, indentured servants, and enslaved Africans. This research perspective has obfuscated the presence and impact of the Weanock (a Late Woodland people situated in the...
Digital Deforestation: DTM Generation with Agisoft Photoscan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Towards a Standardization of Photogrammetric Methods in Archaeology: A Conversation about 'Best Practices' in An Emerging Methodology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Applying digital photogrammetry to archaeological sites is a well-known approach. Also fairly common is photogrammetry’s combination with low-altitude aerial photography (LAAP) in order to generate three-dimensional data and produce GIS outputs such as...
Digital Dig Kits: Portable Affordable Archaeology for Twenty-First-Century Fieldwork (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent advances in lidar technologies have been profound for archaeology, amplifying the subdiscipline of digital archaeology. However, lidar units, both aerial and terrestrial, have remained cost prohibitive until recent products by Apple including the iPad and iPhone Pro series. These products are among the first consumer electronic devices with built-in...
Digitizing Handwritten Field Notebooks: the Impacts of Image Pre-Processing on OCR Text Extraction (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although field notebooks are created as a resource for future archaeologists to reference in their research, the labor required to digitize handwritten notes presents a barrier to their incorporation in state-of-the-art computational analyses. In this research, I explore if image pre-processing can improve the accuracy of text extracted from handwritten...
Directed Movement at Ancient Maya Centers (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Is there a right way to enter a Maya center? A correct order to the viewing and experiencing of the place? How did the physical act of moving through a center inform the understanding of that place, its leaders, oneself? This paper presents the results of several seasons of fieldwork at the Belizean sites of Xunantunich...
The Dirt on Cultural Diversity: Examining Occupation Floor Surfaces in the Moquegua Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Exploring Culture Contact and Diversity in Southern Peru" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent rise in the availability of literature on the topic soil chemical analysis has inspired growing interest in evaluating soils at archaeological sites to gain a more detailed picture of the lives and culture of the people that once lived there. Through soil analysis, we can better define areas once used for residential...
Diversity and Lithic Microwear: Quantification, Classification, and Standardization (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. Over the past decade, lithic microwear analysis has witnessed a shift in how data is collected, moving away from optical microscopy towards a more quantifiable practice. The adoption of surface metrology microscopes, including confocal and focus variation, allows for the measurement of surface roughness or texture, thus distinguishing...
The Diversity of Old Copper Culture Projectile Points (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. The Old Copper Culture (OCC) (4000-1000 B.C.) of the Lake Superior Region of North America features a wide variety of utilitarian tools manufactured from native copper. Here, we assess the technological diversity of copper projectile points found in the region spanning Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota U.S.A., as well as artifacts found...
Divine Food and the Warriors of Curicaueri (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Tzintzuntzan, Capital of the Tarascan Empire: New Perspectives" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Tarascan cosmovision, feeding the gods daily, especially Curicaueri, was vital because it ensured that the world would continue to function; this food was the human sacrifice. At the foot of the platform, one of the most significant pieces of evidence of this act of surrender to the gods was found, where an enormous...
Domestic Craft Specialization and Social Spatial Organization of Harappa (2018)
The site of Harappa, Pakistan, was a major urban center of the Indus Civilization with over two thousand years of occupation (3700-1700 BCE). The site did not have an obvious civic ceremonial center but was instead multi-nodal with walled sub-divisions. As an aspect of stone tool assemblage analysis at the site, the most functionally relevant attributes of the blade tools were differentially weighted to produce a soft hierarchical clustering classification scheme. These classes are considered...
Early Holocene Site Structure at the Little Steamboat Point 1 Rockshelter, Oregon (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Early Holocene component at Little Steamboat Point 1 (LSP-1) Rockshelter consists of flaked stone tools, debitage, ground stone, fire-affected rock, and abundant animal bones. It indicates suggest that people systematically butchered ~1,000 rabbits and hares, constructed cooking features, occasionally processed plants, and manufactured and discarded stone...
The Effect of Climate Change and Human Predation on the Niche Space of North American Proboscideans (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Approximately 13,000 years ago, 37 genera of North American megafauna went extinct. Proboscideans, mammoths, and mastodons, specifically, were among the megafauna affected. Today, researchers continue to debate between three hypotheses to explain these North American Pleistocene mass extinctions: (1) human over-hunting, (2) climate change leading to a reduced niche,...
The Effect of Climate Change on the Niche Space of North American Proboscideans (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most researchers agree that the extinction events of North American megafauna, including proboscideans, occurred approximately 13,000 years ago. The reason for the demise of these creatures, in particular proboscideans such as mammoth and mastodon, is a matter of debate. There are three accepted general hypotheses explaining...
The Effects of Climate Change and Risk on the Foraging-Farming Transition in North America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The evolution of the Homo lineage is characterized by the emergence of numerous biological and cultural traits. One behavioral trait is the transition from foraging to farming. Some scholars suggest that climate change contributed to the emergence of agriculture while others hypothesize that continually increasing foraging risk...
Elk and Archaeological Models in the Shoshone National Forest (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2009, we have been modeling archaeological probability in the Shoshone National Forest. These have been continually refined as new data become available. Now, using newly available elk collar data, we compare patterns in the archaeological record with those of elk movements to evaluate correlations. We compare elk locations with archaeological...
Empire of Aksum Settlement Patterns: Site Size Hierarchy and Spatial Clustering Analyses (2018)
Settlement pattern analysis has long remained a key means of examining the social, economic, and political relationships among archaeological sites and the way those relationships changed through time. Two common approaches involve: 1) analyzing the relative sizes of sites to evaluate possible site size hierarchies, and 2) analyzing the spatial distribution of sites across landscapes to evaluate possible clustering or dispersion. This paper applies more statistically rigorous methods that...
Estimating the Effect of Endogenous Spatial Dependency with a Hierarchical Bayesian CAR Model on Archaeological Site Location Data (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research presents a method to test the endogenous spatial correlation effect when modeling the landscape sensitivity for archaeological sites. The effects of endogenous spatial correlation are inferred using a Hierarchical Bayesian model with an Conditional Auto-Regressive (CAR) component to better understand the...
Evaluating Archaeological Predictability Across the Western United States (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human behavior is patterned in relation to the environment, and these patterns are approximated by the archaeological record. Similarly, the ability to discover archaeological material is patterned in relation to the environment. Geographic Information Systems and statistical software have been used to develop multiple...
Evaluating the Efficacy of Regression and Machine Learning Models to Predict Prehistoric Land-use Patterns (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists continue to rely on predictive models that suffer from the same errors that have plagued the discipline for decades: small training sets, improper statistical techniques, and vague or only implicit theory. To address these shortcomings, we develop a framework for modeling archaeological site occurrences with...
Evidence of Moieties in the Prehistoric Southwest? The Case Study of Sapa'owingeh (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Meaning is assigned to spaces by the individuals who inhabit them. Individuals give spaces meaning many different ways, including through the placement of objects. This poster focuses on the use of kivas and rooms at an ancestral Tewa site in the Southwestern United States. Using ethno-historical data and zooarchaeological techniques to explore and better...
Examining Archaeology, Society, and the Promise of Integrating ‘Big’ Data from Archaeological and non-Archaeological Sources. (2019)
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. In order for digitally published data to be useful it has to be useable, and in the case of big-data, interoperable with other data sources. This paper explores one way in which this can be accomplished through an examination of how archaeological site densities across the eastern and midwestern United States relate to social factors such as...
Exploring High-Elevation Mobility in the Sierra Sur Mountains Past and Present (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse II, Current Research in Oaxaca Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Much like their ancestors did in the past, people in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountains still travel largely on foot to reach places, such as milpas or grazing land, that are completely inaccessible by car. These trips can take hours, following trails that easily cover 500 – 1000 km of vertical movement over rugged terrain....
Exploring Seasonal Aspects of Past Herding Systems Using Bayesian Modeling of Animal δ13C and δ18O Enamel Isotopic Profiles (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intra-tooth samples of enamel δ18O and δ13C isotopic values produce isotopic profiles that reflect seasonal fluctuations in temperature, precipitation, and dietary composition. Archaeologists have interpreted trends found in animal isotopic profiles to estimate birth seasonality and to elucidate past management strategies...