Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)
76-100 (144 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding what favors egalitarian versus non-egalitarian resource access and patterns of behavior is a long-standing topic of interest, with much research narrowing in on potential social and environmental causes. Past modeling exercises have implemented game theoretic and simulation approaches to explore social patterns that may underlay...
Modeling Mobility and Lithic Raw Material Transport in the Late Pleistocene along the Southern Coast of South Africa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how hunter-gatherer groups move around the landscape is essential for answering questions about human behavioral ecology and evolution of the social landscape. Lithic raw material proveniencing sheds light on how far people in the past were traveling for toolstone and...
Modeling Mobility in Inland Waters (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While rivers, lakes, lagoons, and estuaries were commonly navigated in prehistory, the only well-established methods for modeling aquatic human movement are restricted to the open sea. A small handful of researchers have proposed methods and/or attempted to simulate travel in rivers and lakes, but these methods have not been consolidated into a...
Modeling of the Impacts and Sustainability of Ancient Maya Hunting: An Interdisciplinary Ecological and Archaeological Study (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The environmental impact of sizable Late Classic ancient Maya populations remains a persistent question in archaeology. To date, studies of ancient Maya environmental impacts have focused primarily on land-cover change and the conversion of forest to agricultural fields, orchards, and habitation areas. In contrast, few empirical studies have focused on the...
Modeling Pan-Regional Interaction in Precolumbian Lowland Americas (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have speculated for decades that interregional interaction occurred among precolumbian societies occupying the regions of Amazonia, the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and the southeastern United States. Yet no formal investigation has been done into how these people and places were physically integrated across water. This paper seeks to explore...
Modeling the Changes in the Surface Processes at Arslantepe (Malatya) during the Early Bronze Age-I (ca. 5000–4750 cal. BP) (2018)
Agent-based modeling of land use not only illustrates how ancient production mechanisms evolve, but such models also have the power to reconstruct changes in spatio-temporal changes in the dynamics of surface processes in relation with the changes in climatic conditions and varying type and intensity of human land use. Early Bronze Age-I at Arslantepe represents a time period when the paleoclimatic dynamics changed towards more arid conditions while the economy of the site shifted from intensive...
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 Spread of Smallpox during Spanish Colonial Rule in the Chicama Valley, Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Myriad reasons for the native depopulation of the Americas have been cited, chief amongst them is the spread of Old World diseases like smallpox (Variola major) with the arrival of Europeans. Ethnohistorical documents are limited in understanding the direct effects of infectious diseases at the community level, especially in small indigenous towns where...
Monetized Trade and Correlated Risk in Central California (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Isotopic evidence suggests use of shell bead money in central California developed during a time of high environmental uncertainty and decreasing social trust. Monetized exchange likely played a role in risk mitigation while maintaining independence of small groups. As a utility maximizing form of sharing, the...
Navigating the Neolithic of the North Western Approaches (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The dynamics behind the development of the Neolithic in Britain and Ireland has been a topic of debate for over one hundred years. At its heart lie a series of different conceptions as to the nature of connectivity across the seaways of North West Europ. Neolithic practices in Britain are evidenced c. 1000 years later than their arrival in north-west...
A Network Model of Co-Rulership and Community Ritual in Teotihuacan: From Neighborhoods to Districts (2018)
Experts remain divided about the nature of the sociopolitical system of ancient Teotihuacan, which was one of the earliest and largest urban civilizations of the Americas. Excavations hoping to find compelling evidence of a powerful dynasty of rulers, such as a royal tomb, keep coming away empty-handed. However, the alternative possibility of a corporate or collective government, perhaps headed by a small number of co-rulers, also remains poorly understood. A third option is that the city’s...
Network Models for the Emergence of Transportation Infrastructures in Central Italy (1175/1150─500 BC ca) (2018)
The period between the Late Bronze Age and the Archaic Age is a time of change and development in the Italian Peninsula, leading to the formation of the first city-states. In this study, we focused on the Tyrrhenian regions of Latium Vetus and Southern Etruria, by analyzing the emergence of the network of terrestrial routes as it has been inferred from archaeological evidences. Our goal was to explore the mechanisms that shaped the overall structure of these past transportation...
A New Bayesian Approach for Estimating Chronological Events and Phases with ChronoModel (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many issues in archaeology concern the issue of phasing—the beginning, end, and duration of a given period. We define a “Phase” as a group of Events (Event dates) that share common features. Currently used Phase models implemented in many software packages employ statistical models that concentrate posterior Event dates....
New Revelations on Mediterranean Bronze Age Iberia through Network Inference (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mediterranean Archaeology: Connections, Interactions, Objects, and Theory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Valencian Bronze Age, located in the modern-day province of Valencia, Spain is an overlooked player in Mediterranean prehistory. The inhabitants are the indigenous peoples and precursors to the Iberians, so famously cited by the Romans, yet so little cited despite being demonstrably connected to the trends of...
One Thing Leads to Another: Causal Triggering among Archaeological Events (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 causal connection between archaeological events is frequently little more than a convenient assumption. The repeated occupation of a site, the occurrence in time and space of a ceramic ware, or the phases of settlement construction are all assumed to reflect some causal sequence, but it is far from...
The Ostra Collecting Station Site: A Virtual Reconstruction (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Virtual reality is a tool that can be used to enhance archeological analyses. My research explores using excavation data to develop a 3D immersive and interactive simulated environment representative of an archaeological site. Incorporating virtual reality in site analyses provides an interface where data can be used to test various hypotheses and can be...
Paleocurrents in a Least-Cost Pathway Model of Human Dispersal from Sunda to Sahul, 65 – 45 Kya (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The timing of human colonization of Sahul, potentially as early as 65 ka (up from the previous 42 ka) has revised our understanding of the dispersal of anatomically modern humans (AMH). This movement represents, to date, the earliest known AMH long distance migration by sea, implying significant levels of complex language, marine technology, and colonization...
Paleoindian Settlement of the Central Great Basin: Testing Environmental, Radiocarbon, and Lithic Proxies with Data from Grass Valley, Nevada (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. Explaining Paleoindian settlement decisions in the Central Great Basin remains an important though controversial topic. Unfortunately, the limited archaeological and paleoenvironmental records from the region make progress on this issue challenging. To help address some of the problems of limited data in order to better...
Paleoshoreline Reconstruction: A First Approximation to Submerged Prehistoric Landscapes of Isla Espíritu Santo, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Liquid Landscapes: Recent Developments in Submerged Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient coastline modeling is an effective method for reconstructing submerged prehistoric landscapes, allowing us to understand the human use of the coastal zone through time. Here we present data from Espíritu Santo Island, one of the oldest human settlement areas in the Baja California Peninsula. This study...
Pastoral Territoriality as a Dynamic Coupled Human-Natural System (2018)
Despite research indicating that contemporary pastoral societies are more dynamic than previously assumed, there is a tendency to view South Arabian pastoralists as timeless heirs of a stable, ancient system or along a historical continuum of response to exogenous factors like the development of civilization, introduction of camels, or global climate change. In research triggered by NGS support, we proposal a new conceptual model for pastoral mobility regulated by dynamic feedback loops in...
Pastoralist Land Use and Mobility in the Horn of Africa: An Archaeological Predictive Model (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological Predictive Models (APMs) are a critical tool for archaeologists working across the globe; however, they are underutilized in continental Africa. As part of ongoing archaeological research in Djibouti, the Southeast Djibouti Regional Archaeological Project (SEDRAProject) developed an ArcGIS-based APM for pastoralist sites in the eastern Horn...
Patterns of Artifact Variability and Changes in the Social Networks of Paleoindian and Early Archaic Hunter-Gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands: A Critical Appraisal and Call for a Reboot (2018)
Inferences about the social networks of Paleoindian and Early Archaic hunter-gatherer societies in the Eastern Woodlands are generally underlain by the assumption that there are simple, logical relationships between (1) patterns of social interaction within and between those societies and (2) patterns of variability in their material culture. Formalized bifacial projectile points are certainly the residues of systems of social interaction, and therefore have the potential to tell us something...
A Population Graph Based Style Transmission Model (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. The now classic Neiman (1995) is a baseline for many influential applications of Cultural Transmission to explore Stylistic Variability in archaeology. It and many of its successors represent social interaction and generational development in a deliberately simplified way to facilitate the...
Potential Applications for Agent-Based Models in Obsidian Studies (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Obsidian Studies of the Old and New Worlds" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have been using agent-based modelling (ABM) to re-create prehistoric social, economic, and political processes, along with prehistoric environments since the first publication of the model commonly known as "Artificial Anasazi." Very few archaeologists have attempted to model prehistoric lithic technology, however,...
Precontact Coast Salish Seasonality in Social Networks: A Modeling Approach (2018)
A crucial aspect for examining the production and reproduction of material culture among complex foraging societies such as those of the Pacific Northwest Coast is understanding the relationships between social networks and assemblage diversity. This model examines one small aspect of this issue, seasonal variation in social network size. The model is ethnographically informed by Coast Salish ethnographic household sizes. Assemblage richness and evenness in discrete artifact styles are examined...