Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Damon Mullen. Karl Reinhard. Alvaro Montenegro. John Hawdon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans brought many things with them when they came to the Americas. This study focuses on hookworms and domesticated dogs to revise, constrain, or enhance theoretical models of when and how humans first came to the Americas. The hookworm life cycle is critically dependent upon the environmental conditions and proximity to suitable hosts. Its eggs leave...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Wholey. Daria Nikitina. Katherine Dowling.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Delaware Bay is the second largest estuary along the US Atlantic coast and is experiencing some of the gravest effects from climate-driven sea level rise along the East Coast. Certain areas along the bay have the lowest mean elevation in the USA and are experiencing both accelerated sea level...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Enrico Crema. Anne Kandler. Clémentine Straub.

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. Since the seminal works by Neiman (1995) and Shennan & Wilkinson (2001), evolutionary archaeologists and anthropologists have been trying to infer social learning strategies by analysing the temporal frequency of different cultural variants in a population. These early applications directly employed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ted Parsons.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Small and inexpensive alternatives for capturing three-dimensional (3D) data have continued to proliferate. Previous 3D capture systems included specialized Google and Sony smartphones, the Scanse Sweep, and the moderately expensive DotProduct DPI-8X handheld scanner. This poster examines developments in the low-cost scanner arena during the last two years...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wetherbee Dorshow. Michael Heckenberger.

In the southern Amazon, two decades of rapid agro-pastoral development, extreme drought, and forest fires in the "arc of deforestation" threaten to precipitate an ecological oscillation of southern transitional forests from an eco-region dominated by closed tropical forest to one of open savanna and woodlands. Collaborative research conducted with the Kuikuro indigenous community in the Xingu River headwaters, involving archaeology, soil science, paleoecology, remote sensing, geospatial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Burns.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For settlement pattern analysis where territorial exclusion is assumed to be at play, Fretwell and Lucas's 1969 model is still the core explanation for IDD. Rather than focus on population density, it would be more in keeping with formal models of behavioral ecology to analyze the dynamic through marginal analysis. Established groups should defend...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Blackwood.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Virtual reality (VR) provides a powerful platform to disseminate, showcase and protect archaeological research; it is a relatively inexpensive tool that can be applied to the discipline of archaeology by offering a new way to analyze and visualize archaeological sites as they once were. VR can immerse the user in the simulated environment, allow them to walk...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Fries.

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. The ancient Maya settlements of the Aguacate region of western Belize feature a dispersed settlement pattern spread across a highly varied landscape. Both soil and water resources are unevenly distributed across the region, interspersed with karst outcrops and ridges. Nonetheless,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Davies. Matthew Douglass.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Concepts from resilience theory (RT) have been variously applied in studies of the deep human past. Given emphasis on cross-scale interactions and cyclical trajectories, RT provides a framework to interpret historical sequences in terms of general ecological processes. However, less consideration has been given to the interface between the trajectories of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sam Lin.

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Rolland and Dibble synthesis was an ambitious attempt to reframe the interpretation of Middle Paleolithic variability. The model postulates that Middle Paleolithic assemblage variability is continuous in nature, driven principally by raw material availability and occupation intensity....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erick Robinson. Jacob Freeman. Robert Kelly.

This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Climate-Human Population Dynamics During the Late Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many archaeological radiocarbon time-series throughout the world display a decline of radiocarbon date frequencies from ca. 900-600 cal BP. In this presentation we examine alternative hypotheses that may explain these trends. We analyze whether dramatic declines in radiocarbon date frequencies are due to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Kara.

The Classic Maya collapse remains as both relevant and controversial a topic as ever. For over a century, dozens of researchers have proposed different causes that may have driven this complex process. The last few decades have witnessed the academic community’s opinion converge on the notion that many different social and environmental factors, operating at likewise diverse scales, somehow contributed to a temporally gradual and spatially heterogeneous disruption of the demographic, political,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Rorabaugh.

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nontraditional tools and mediums can provide unique methodological and interpretive opportunities for archaeologists. In this case, the Unreal Engine (UE), which is typically used for games and media, has provided a powerful tool for non-programmers to engage with 3D visualization and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerardo Aldana. Marcus Thomson. Thomas Thelen. Toni Gonzalez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In "The Forms of Capital," Pierre Bourdieu writes: “[t]he social world is accumulated history, and if it is not to be reduced to a discontinuous series of instantaneous mechanical equilibria between agents who are treated as interchangeable particles, one must reintroduce into it the notion of capital and with it, accumulation and all its effects.” His attempt...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Sabin. Jessi Halligan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The past 18,000 years in northern Florida have been characterized by shifts in climate and sea level, which affected settlement patterns and site preservation. Regional sea level curves have only recently been established with the accuracy and resolution required to model paleohydrology (Joy 2018). Advances in non-linear modeling and the use of multi-sclar...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Barrett. Simon Holdaway.

This is an abstract from the "Variability: A Reassessment of Its Meaning, Afforded Range, and the Relation to Process" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Artifact density and techno-morphological form distribution in lithic assemblages are often used to make inferences about mobility. However, the relationship between such observations and mobility strategies varies with socio-natural contexts, leading to contrasting interpretations of the same data....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Davies. Jessica Thompson.

This is an abstract from the "Developing Paleolithic Excavation Methods for the Twenty-First Century" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Piece-plotting, or point proveniencing, is a common practice in field archaeology. These data are important for intrasite spatial analysis and evaluating site formation processes. More detailed data collection requires more time and effort, leading to different decisions about size cutoffs between projects. Factors...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Harris.

A Bayesian model of Distribution Regression using a Mean Embedding Ridge Regression (MERR) algorithm is developed to address two primary shortcomings of current Archaeological Predictive Modeling (APM) practice; 1) neglecting the richness of archaeological landforms by collapsing a site to a single point or observation; and 2) disregarding the implicit and explicit uncertainty of archaeological data, predictions, and model parameters. This research addresses the first hurdle by developing a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carl Lipo. Mark Madsen. Robert Dinapoli. Terry Hunt.

This is an abstract from the "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Due to the effects of drift on small and isolated populations, island environments pose particular evolutionary challenges in the retention of richness and diversity of cultural information. Such variation, however, can have significant fitness consequences particularly when environmental conditions change in an unpredictable fashion:...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bettina Schulz Paulsson.

This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sperm whales played a central role in the cosmological world view of early megalithic societies (4700-4200 cal BC) in the Bay of Morbihan, Brittany, France. The whales were engraved as iconic signs on colossal standing stones, some of which were re-used to build megalithic graves. The largest of these standing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wesley Gibson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this research, I explore the efficacy of stream network analysis as a data set to use in archaeological predictive modeling. Stream network analysis allows the researcher to use a digital elevation model (DEM) to create a geographic information system (GIS) layer representing stream channels in a study area. Stream network analysis can also be used to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blank. Matt Chmura. Sarah K. Gilleland.

Polynesian i’a makau, or fishhooks, may stand in for ceramics for the purpose of generating culture-historical units, facilitating relative dating of the three Hawaiian assemblages under scrutiny (Allen 1996). Artifact assemblages at Waiahukini, Makalei, and Pu’u Ali’i contained over 1000 intact or partial fishhooks and fragments of shaped pig bone representing unfinished manufacture. Allen’s (2015) conceptual style-function model of hook attributes necessitates a focus on stylistic shank...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Robertshaw. Frances Berdan. Bernardo Renteria.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Field schools have been the best way to provide hands-on experience with archaeological fieldwork in an environment geared to student learning. However, field schools are beyond the financial and logistical reach of many students, particularly first-generation students and those from underrepresented groups. The decreasing costs and increasing accessibility of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Collard. Brea McCauley. Chris Carleton. André Costopoulos.

The construction of shrines, tombs, and other monuments is one of the most puzzling human behaviors from an evolutionary perspective. Building monuments is costly in terms of time and energy, and yet it is difficult to see how it contributes to survival and reproduction. In the late 1980s, Dunnell argued that monument building and other apparently wasteful behaviors are in fact adaptive in environments that are characterized by severe and/or unpredictable perturbations. Such behaviors are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Field.

This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning with Neil Judd’s early speculations about timber importation, the Chaco road network has been the basis of diverse and often contrasting archaeological interpretations about the use of such unique landscape features. While a wide-array of interpretations have been suggested, recent least cost analyses reiterate...