Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wetherbee Dorshow.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper summarizes preliminary results of an AI-based analysis that identifies potential precolumbian Amazonian archaeological site locations based on the presence of clusters of a specific species of palm tree. The study uses Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, and Planet satellite imagery as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lewis Borck. Corinne L. Hofman. Manfred Schäfer. Angus A. A. Mol. Daniel Weidele.

This paper uses the Nexus 1492 database, built over approximately 30 years of fieldwork, to examine ceramic attribute variability throughout the Antillean Islands. Regional ceramic analyses often focus on the construction of ceramic typologies that are then used to compare typological proportions, differences, and similarities at various spatial resolutions across temporal periods. Long-standing critiques of the use of typologies and taxonomies in archaeology (sensu Brew 1946; Gnecco and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Brown.

John Rick’s 1987 paper in American Antiquity presented the first systematic overview of theory underlying the "dates as data" approach (i.e., demographic temporal frequency analysis, dTFA), describing the general outline of a data generating process (DGP) linking paleopopulation dynamics to temporal distributions of archaeological materials (temporal frequency distributions, tfds). While research pursued in the dTFA framework has gained momentum over the intervening decades, questions regarding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Froese.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A simulation model of Teotihuacan’s hypothetical collective government has shown that a highly distributed network of leaders could have been effective at ensuring social coordination in the city by means of consensus formation. The model makes a strong prediction: it indicates that this collective mode of government would have been most effective in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kayeleigh Sharp.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early archaeological works that overemphasized societal elites and funerary contexts have led to several biases that limit comprehension of society’s lower-echelon, or their roll in quotidian social spheres (political, religious or economic) during the latter part of the first millennium on Peru’s north coast. This is a topic of much interest when considering...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Gauthier.

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. Distance is a fundamental constraint on human social interaction. This basic principle motivates the use of spatial interaction models for estimating flows of people, information, and resources on spatial and social networks. These models have both valid dynamical​ and​ statistical interpretations, a key strength well supported...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik R. Otárola-Castillo.

The environment has a strong influence on the evolutionary ecology of hunter-gatherer foraging. Studies of prehistoric hunter-gatherers have often made hypotheses regarding the effect of climate on foraging strategies, but have rarely tested those hypotheses. The absence of explicit hypothesis testing has been partly due to a dearth of operationalized paleoenvironmental variables. Although paleoenvironmental reconstructions have been abundant, particularly those based on pollen, they have mostly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Tiffany. Shirley J. Schermer.

One of Larry Zimmerman’s lasting contributions to archaeology is his research on the Central Plains tradition Glenwood culture in southwest Iowa. New site seriations, AMS radiocarbon dating, and site modeling utilizing GIS, all address fundamental assumptions derived from Zimmerman’s research in the 1970s. The current model proposes a short-term occupation consisting primarily of dispersed farmsteads and possibly two or three unfortified house clusters in the Glenwood locality. Site location is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elspeth Ready. Michael Holton Price.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades of research in human behavioral ecology (HBE) demonstrates that questions about human ecological and reproductive adaptations generally lead to questions about cooperation. Partly for this reason, much recent research in HBE has focused on issues such as marriage, cooperative child raising, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Druggan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maize was ubiquitous in eastern North America at the time of European contact; however, the timing and trajectory of its introduction and adoption by communities across the region remain unclear. Recent redating of collections previously reported to support Middle Woodland maize have rejected original interpretations by either yielding dates centuries...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Davies.

This is an abstract from the "Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Current debates over migration and mobility in Pacific prehistory hinge on the capacity of mariners to sail to windward. With this ability, voyages between any two points were possible, with ease of travel conditioned on the favorability of winds. Without it, movement in any given direction was dependent on winds traveling along a similar path, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Nabity. Jacob Freeman. Dave Byers. Erick Robinson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The intensification of production by human groups has occurred at various times around the globe. Intensification correlates with increases in population size, increased labor investment in food production, and decreased residential mobility; the opposite (de-intensification) correlates with decreases in population size, decreased labor investments in food...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alvaro Montenegro. Boel Bessemer-Clark. Ashley Green. Johan Ling.

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. Here we describe the implementation of a realistic representation of paddling propulsion on a deterministic ocean voyaging computer model. Due to lack of quantified information on the impact of environmental parameters such as winds and currents on paddling, in a previous version of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Gauthier.

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological data are crucial for understanding how human societies shaped—and were shaped by—their biophysical environments. Yet these data are often sparse, noisy, and time averaged, making it difficult to uncover patterns of change across space and time. Process-based simulations are one way to fill the gaps in these imperfect proxy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Kvamme.

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 regional investigations of settlement location the analyst typically assumes that appropriate variables have been identified—important variables have not been omitted and irrelevant ones have not been included—an assumption not always justified. The identification of a "minimum set" of location requirements is more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Wren. Ariane Burke.

During the Last Glacial Maximum the population of Western Europe contracted its range as the climate became less hospitable and more unpredictable. Mobility decisions must have been a key part of human adaptation during this time but are notoriously difficult to extract from archaeological data. Agent-based modelling offers one way to explore human mobility heuristically, producing test implications that can be tested using the archaeological record. We use a model of habitat suitability derived...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eunice Villasenor Iribe. Christopher Morehart.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studying agricultural productivity and intensification elucidates the behavioral and demographic patterns of past societies. By understanding how physical environments were modified for agricultural use, it is possible to determine key economic and social processes. This paper presents the results of the analysis of terraces associated with the Epiclassic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrés Mejía Ramón. Jessica Munson. Jill Onken. Lorena Paiz Aragón.

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. Any sizable population must be sustained by an adequate food supply. As such, estimates for high population densities in the Maya Lowlands must be met with an equal or greater productive capacity. The “Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities” symposium seeks to understand this on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Weston McCool. Brian Codding. Kenneth Vernon.

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Violence is a pervasive feature of human prehistory, and its traces can be found throughout the archaeological record. Collective violence has important effects on individual survival and is thought to play a critical role in the evolution of complex social systems. However, participation in coalitionary violence elicits a collective action problem and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tia Cody. Shelby Anderson.

This is an abstract from the "Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation details the development, testing, and results of a lidar and remote sensing predictive model to locate precontact mound sites in the Calapooia Watershed in the Willamette Valley, Oregon. Not much is known about these mound sites archaeologically, including where they are located in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darcy Bird. Jacob Freeman.

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. Recent analyses of large sample of radiocarbon ages illustrate the potential of these records to investigate general problems in human ecology. While much of the current literature focuses on the relationship between local ecology shifts and population booms or busts, no one has yet to address the general...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Vining. Seth Price.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Broad regions of Peru’s coastal desert are now highly adverse marginal environments, yet archaeological evidence indicate these settings often were used extensively in the past. Using a time-series analysis of Sentinel 1 and 2 remote sensing data, we document surface and groundwater resources that developed in the normally hyperarid desert margins of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Reese. Brian Yaquinto.

Archaeologists are inherently limited in their understanding of the past by the quality and quantity of data available. In the US Southwest, we are fortunate to work in a region with a high degree of preservation and long history of archaeological inquiry. Because we work in a region with a dense and well-known archaeological record, we sometimes take what we know for granted and do not critically examine our assumptions. In the Mesa Verde region, extensive survey and excavation have revealed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernadette Cap. Jason Yaeger. M. Kathryn Brown.

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. Modeling agricultural yields provides one way to examine questions of Classic Maya agricultural practices and land management, with follow-on implications regarding intensification, household sustainability, and exchange practices. In this paper, we use models to examine whether milpa...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela De La Puente-León. Sarah Coon. Francesca Fernandini. Erik Otárola-Castillo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first South Americans' coastal migration routes remain a central question to studying the settlement patterns of human colonizations worldwide. However, these early migrations likely occurred along a coastline that today is mostly submerged. Consequently, in countries like Peru, there is currently a shortage of coastal archaeological sites that date to...