Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)
26-50 (144 Records)
Extensive archaeological field work and multidisciplinary research in recent decades shows that communities of sedentary hunter-gatherers during the tenth millenium BC built the earliest presently known monumental structures during the PPNA (ca. 9600–8800 BC) at the ceremonial site of Göbekli Tepe and nearby PPNB settlement sites in present-day Urfa province, southeastern Turkey. However, the earliest evidence of agriculture dates to a later period (early PPNB, ca. 8750 BC, terminus post quem)...
Computational Models of Human Settlement Behavior: An Overview of Current Methods and Motivations (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Computational models of human settlement have been noticeable features of intra- and interdisciplinary research for several decades, whether such models focus on the present day, on the historically documented near-present, or on deeper archaeological time scales. Now is a useful moment to revisit the pedigree of these different...
Dates as Data: Where Are We Now in Using Radiocarbon Dates to Infer Population Histories? (2018)
Archaeologists have long used site counts and other measures to infer past population histories and such efforts have always been criticised by those who point to all the known and unknown unknowns that in their view make such efforts as dubious as getting to the topmost steps on Hawkes’s ladder of inference. In recent years most effort has been devoted to the use of summed radiocarbon probabilities for demographic inference since for most of later prehistory in most of the world it gives a much...
Decomposing Habitat Suitability With Theory-Driven Machine-Learning (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological applications of ideal distribution models have advanced beyond the study of straightforward settlement decisions to address a variety of important but difficult anthropological questions. To aid in these investigations, we demonstrate a method for (i) decomposing habitat...
Deepdive: Using AI and Virtual Reality to Explore Ancient Submerged Civilizations (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Submerged Prehistoric Archaeology is a subdiscipline of archaeology that deals with the discovery of ancient submerged landscapes. In Europe alone over 3,000 submerged ancient sites are recorded. While there is an increased number of submerged sites in North America, the emphasis has on the study of shipwrecks and historical questions related to nautical...
Demography and Social Organization of the Cucuteni-Tripolye Populations: An Evolutionary Perspective (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper addresses the broad issue of population estimates as proxies and drivers of the evolution of social structures taking the example of the Cucuteni-Tripolye cultural complex (CTCC) covering a territory from the Eastern Carpathians to the Dnieper region...
Density Dependent Models Rely on Accurate Population Estimates (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists increasingly leverage ideal distribution models to analyze settlement and demographic patterning in the past. Successful application requires adequate, spatially explicit proxies of both environmental suitability and past population. This paper focuses on the latter, recognizing that a growing number of studies rely on summaries of...
Did the Neolithic Revolution Revolutionize the European Landscape? An Analysis of the Relationship between Climate, Vegetation, and the Arrival of Agro-pastoral Subsistence (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long recognized the spread and adoption of agro-pastoral subsistence in Europe as a transformative economic and social process. While many studies have tied site-specific changes in vegetation communities to the arrival of the Neolithic, very few attempts have been made at synthesizing these data to examine the Neolithic revolution in...
The Dreaded Pox: Agent-Based Simulation of the 1870 Smallpox Epidemic in Tucson, Arizona (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In October of 1869 a smallpox outbreak developed in Tucson, Arizona, which lasted until late April of 1870. Historical documents do not agree on the number of deaths resulting from the epidemic, and no concrete information is given about the extent of the illness spread through the Tucson community or the surrounding region. Bioarchaeological evidence of...
Dynamic Coastlines: Modeling the Impacts of the Intertidal Zone Transformation for Puerto Rico during the Mid- to Late Holocene (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As Caribbean research engages in the study of past human-environmental relations, few efforts have focused on the reconstruction of the dynamic intertidal zone and its impacts on past food security and livelihood. Interdisciplinary approaches can address this gap as these paleogeographic and paleoclimatic reconstructions contribute an understanding of coastal...
Dynamic Simulation of Large Herbivore Distribution during the Last Glacial Maximum: Implications for the Distribution of Human Populations (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. In this study we propose the use of agent-based modelling (ABM) and cellular automata (CA) to test the impact of predator-prey relationships on the distribution of prehistoric human populations. Our research goal is to establish a dynamic model of the distribution of large herbivores that constituted the main food source for...
Ecologies of Space and Time: The Shared History of Humans and Fire in the Jemez Mountains, NM (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ann F. Ramenofsky: Papers in Honor of a Non-Normative Career" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the southwestern US humans and ecosystems share a history of fire. An integrated archaeo-ecological framework offers an important interpretive lens for both archaeologists and ecologists. Contemporary ecological patterns and processes that are thought to be ‘native’ or ‘natural’ may in fact be highly influenced by past...
The Ecology of Agglomeration and the Rise of Chaco Great Houses (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decisions individuals make about where to live have profound consequences for everything from climate and conflict, to migration, inequality, the origins of agriculture, and urban development. It is not surprising that understanding and explaining those decisions remains an open and active area of research within archaeology. Many of the important...
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 ENSO on Travel along the Pacific Coast of the Americas (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, prehistoric contacts have been suggested between Ecuador and western Mexico, occurring from 400 BC, if not earlier, to the sixteenth century based on similarities in mortuary behaviors, ceramic technology, language, and ethnohistoric accounts, and other lines of evidence. However, the frequency of these...
Epigraphy and the Archaeology of Settlement in the Dolores Region, Peten, Guatemala (2019)
This is an abstract from the "At the Interface the Use of Archaeology and Texts in Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper summarizes recent research into the timing, distribution, and causes of ancient Maya settlement in the area of Dolores, Peten, Guatemala, in the western Maya Mountains. Integrating evidence from hieroglyphic inscriptions, ceramic studies, and GIS modeling of least-cost pathways and viewsheds, I propose an...
Erosion and Agricultural Resilience in the Formative Teotihuacan Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Formative Period, the Teotihuacan Valley’s population was dispersed in small farming settlements in the piedmont slopes surrounding the valley bottom. The end of this period witnessed a dramatic population shift, with the Valley’s inhabitants clustering near perennial streams on the valley floor, along with thousands of new migrants. Erosion is...
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 Differential Animal Carcass Transport Decisions at Regional Scales using Bayesian Mixed-Effects Models (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. Zooarchaeologists frequently face the problem of explaining uneven skeletal element representation, with explanations involving either non-human taphonomic agents or differential carcass transport decisions made by humans. Existing statistical methods for evaluating these explanations are generally applicable at the...
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...
Evaluating the Impacts of Past Climate Change on Demographic and Subsistence Patterns in the Basin-Plateau Region of Western North America (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People, Climate, and Proxies in Holocene Western North America" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological and paleoclimatological research increasingly reveal long-term impacts of past climate on human subsistence, settlement, and demography, yet positive results are debated and the underlying dynamics structuring these correlations remain questioned. Coupling a comprehensive dataset of radiocarbon-dated...
Evolution for the People: Big Data, Big Software, and How Compliance Archaeology is the Missing Link of Evolutionary Archaeology (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. A growing concern in archaeology is the potential inaccessibility of various methodological and theoretical approaches in non-academic contexts. Open access and open source software (R, Quantum GIS, ImageJ) provide means for applying complex analyses within a budget, but due to cybersecurity...
Evolution of the Anthropocene (2018)
Why did humans, unlike any other multicellular species in the history of the Earth, gain the capacity to shift Earth into a new epoch of geologic time, the Anthropocene? Here, a general causal theory, sociocultural niche construction, is presented to explain long-term changes in Earth’s ecology driven by societal dynamics across human generational time through sociocultural evolution of subsistence regimes based on cooperative ecosystem engineering, social specialization, non-kin exchange and...
Explaining Paleoindian Settlement in the Intermountain West: A Regression Adjustment Approach (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Identifying the ecological drivers of Paleoindian settlement has broad implications for a host of related behaviors, including colonization, mobility, and subsistence. Unfortunately, important proxies like spatial site patterning suffer from well-known sampling biases, most notably, taphonomic decay, opportunistic survey,...
Explaining Variation in the Scale of Neolithic Quarry and Mine Production (2018)
In recent years new methods have been developed for using summed radiocarbon probabilities as a population proxy and for comparing radiocarbon datasets to establish whether they are significantly different from one another, while taking into account sampling variation and the patterns in the calibration curve. On the basis of newly collected and updated radiocarbon data on the dating of Neolithic mines and quarries in in Britain, Ireland and continental Northwest Europe, the paper will present...