Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)

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 Dominika Sieczkowska. Bartlomiej Cmielewski. Jose Bastante.

This is an abstract from the "Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Chachabamba archaeological site in the Machu Picchu National Archeological Park contains a unique water complex erected by the Incas. Based on archaeological investigations, it has been established that the function of this water complex was strictly ceremonial. The necessity to control water flow in an architectural context...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alvaro Montenegro.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The efficiency and safety of ocean travel is greatly dependent on along-trip environmental conditions. Agent-based simulations that optimize routes based on expected environmental conditions have been used by the shipping industry and the sailboat racing community for decades. Some recent efforts in archaeology have used the latter models. Here I describe...

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 Full-Text Brian McCray. Jesse Stephen. Christopher Nicholson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite advances made in open access publishing, significant archaeological information remains confined to the grey literature or to unpublished, internal reports in the possession of institutions. For at least twenty years, archaeologists have realized that digital archiving could make this material more accessible at a larger scale, but the tools to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bridgette Degnan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across all social ranks, ancient Maya people were connected to both long-distance and local exchange systems that provided access to necessary goods like obsidian, ceramics, salt, stone tools, and granite grinding stones. Many studies of long-distance exchange focus on obsidian because it is ubiquitous at Maya sites and can be geochemically matched to a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Casey Black.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The paradigm of Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) utilizes behavioral ecological models to understand the adaptive relationship between human behavior and the environment in which people reside. The introduction of intentional sustainability to HBE models benefits this paradigm by diversifying the factors that influence human behavior and developing a greater...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Ploetz.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wetland ecosystems have long played a crucial role in human societies. Using a Historical Ecology framework, we integrate traditional archaeological excavations with airborne and iPhone lidar to explore the paleoenvironmental history in the wetlands of northwestern Belize. We assess soil collected from archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jasmine Vieri. Enrico Crema. Agnese Benzonelli. Juanita Sáenz Samper. Marcos Martinón-Torres.

This is an abstract from the "Materials in Movement in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Muisca of the Eastern Cordillera of Colombia are known for making extensive use of imported gold to manufacture both votive metalwork and body ornamentation over a millennium. To better understand the materiality of this imported raw material, we present new computational models of the compositional datasets pertaining to Muisca...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ginessa Mahar. Kenneth Sassaman.

This is an abstract from the "*SE Stakes and Stones: Current Archaeological Approaches to Fish Weir Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The increase in frequency and intensity of storm events in the twenty-first century has inspired communities worldwide to reconsider their investment and approach to coastal infrastructure. As often is the case, modern problems serve to inspire archaeological inquiry. In this paper we explore the advantages...

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 Benjamin Vining. Daniel Contreras. Augusto Bazan. Kurt Wilson. Cesca Craig.

This is an abstract from the "Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Abrupt climatic changes caused by El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) bring profound ecological transformations to the Andean pacific coast. Archaeological research has largely focused on the impacts (which have been shown to be largely negative) of ENSO-positive phases, or “El Niños,” on complex socioecological systems in coastal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Palace.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists are increasingly adept at using satellite imagery, commonly using it to find sites and to examine topography around sites. Using remotely sensed imagery to examine underlying phenomena of potentially linked environmental attributes is, however, underutilized in archaeological research. Previously, we used...

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 Patrick Livingood.

This is an abstract from the "What’s Canoe? Recent Research on Dugouts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. David Hurst Thomas (1972) described how model building and simulation can lead to serendipitous discoveries, that is findings that were not originally intended. In several projects to simulate cost distance of canoe travel in eastern North America, most of the memorable and impactful lessons have been a result of serendipity. This paper will...

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 Thomas Garrison.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The looting of sites in the Maya Lowlands began in earnest in the mid-twentieth century as collectors sought to acquire carved stone monuments with inscribed texts. The discovery of spectacular portable objects, often in burials, by large-scale projects led to the illicit excavation of ruined mounds throughout the Maya area...

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 Kohei Tamura.

This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Comparative studies using archaeological data on a broad spatiotemporal scale can provide an overview for investigating significant questions in human history and can promote discussions among scholars from different disciplines. This talk will present the results of a quantitative analysis of lithic technologies from the...

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 Alexei Vranich.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The monumental walls of Sacsayhuaman, an Inca ceremonial complex in Cusco, Peru, represent one of the most enigmatic examples of megalithic architecture. Despite their iconic status, the construction methods, technologies, and materials used to create these colossal stone structures remain subjects of ongoing debate. This paper combines archaeological...

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...