Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)

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 Michael Zimmerman. Mikheil Elashvili. Giorgi Datunashvili.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2019, a three-year NSF IRES grant (#1854153) was awarded to Bridgewater State University, Ilia State University, and the Cyberarchaeology Lab at U.C. San Diego to engage U.S. undergraduate students in interdisciplinary research of historical and ongoing human-environmental interactions in the Shiraki Plateau in the southeastern part of the country of...

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 Kenneth Vernon. Scott Ortman.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Applications of Network Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Community centers often play a dual role in archaeological contexts, as a civic space where individuals can participate in shared rituals and exchange and as a residential space connecting a large number of unrelated households. Given that these two roles are not perfectly coincident with each other, it is interesting to consider why...

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 Geoffrey Clark.

This is an abstract from the "Local and/or Exotic Interactions: Symbols, Materials, and Societies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Summed probability distributions of radiocarbon dates (SPD curves) have become an increasingly popular tool with which to reconstruct prehistoric population dynamics. They are used here to test models of demographic change using Mesolithic data from Cantabria and the middle Ebro valley. Local, regional, and global...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wesley Bernardini.

This is an abstract from the "Attention to Detail: A Pragmatic Career of Research, Mentoring, and Service, Papers in Honor of Keith Kintigh" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. More than any other scholar in the American Southwest, Keith Kintigh is responsible for spreading numeracy – the ability to understand and work with numbers – to the current generation of Southwestern archaeologists. His Tools for Quantitative Archaeology (TFQA) software...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Morucci.

This is an abstract from the "Current Zooarchaeology: New and Ongoing Approaches" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sarcoptic mange is a highly infectious, zoonotic disease endemic to modern Andean camelid populations. Severe infection can result in the loss of wool and death of the animal. Rapid spread can lead to significant economic losses and population instability. Despite widespread awareness and preventative measures taken by modern camelid...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Mark. Justin Holcomb. David Carballo.

The diffusion and spread of material culture is a cornerstone of archaeological research, particularly understanding the variables which dictate the structure of dispersal. Recent evolutionary approaches have sought to address technological spread through mathematical modeling. One model, the reaction-diffusion model, suggests diffusion occurs at the population scale as a wave-of-dispersal. While previous researchers demonstrated the efficacy of this approach regarding the peopling of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only T. L. Thurston.

This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most of pre-modem Sweden comprised wooded uplands lying outside more densely populated 'civilized' regions. Often collectively called The Great Forest, this territory stretched from south-central to the high north, where Scandinavian, Finnish, and Sami people often lived in close proximity....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Carroll.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From gypsum reliefs that once decorated the walls of the Assyrian capital at Nineveh, archaeologists know that Sennacherib’s army laid waste to the city of Lachish, Judah (now Israel) in 701 BC. There remains no consensus on how these events unfolded, but many researchers agree that the Lachish reliefs were intended to serve as both historical record and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Conolly. Daniel Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle to Late Woodland transition in southern Ontario extends over approximately 500 years and encompasses several changes in subsistence and settlement patterns, ritual practices, and ceramic and lithic crafting traditions. The last major review of the radiocarbon chronology related to these changes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias. Robert Bischoff.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Applications of Network Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists use a wide variety of material culture and methods to construct and analyze networks. Just how these networks relate to past behavior is an open question, as we lack information on the relationship between behavior and material culture in the past. We do not have adequate datasets of people interacting with people alongside...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefani Crabtree.

Archaeological studies benefit from rich ecological data, yet linking ecological data to narratives of the past can be difficult. Here I use trophic network modeling to understand both Ancestral Pueblo and Australian Aboriginal food webs, comparing these systems for a greater understanding of human and environmental resilience. Here I show that Ancestral Pueblo people connected themselves into a greater environmental web and use network analysis to examine how the changing network properties of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Bradley. Geoffrey Smith. Kenneth Nussear.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Great Basin underwent considerable environmental change during the Pleistocene–Holocene transition, such as lower precipitation, increased temperatures, and the diminishment of lakes and wetlands. Archaeologists have long hypothesized that people responded by altering their settlement-subsistence strategies. Some models outlining these responses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefani Crabtree.

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. Our understanding of the dynamics and stability of human systems cannot be uncoupled from their environmental and ecological contexts. Archaeological knowledge can deeply inform, enhance and transform our understanding of socio-ecological dynamics and sustainability, if we can only quantitatively assess these interactions. One...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Woollett. Céline Dupont-Hébert. Paul Adderley. Guðrun Alda Gísladóttir. Natasha Roy.

Recent studies have identified an important reorganization of the Svalbarð estate, north-east Iceland around AD 1300. The initial coastal-focused settlement of the region was followed by the founding of new farms in the deep interior. Most were not sustained and some farm sites on the coast were also reduced. Initially, the magnate’s farm of Svalbarð had a herding economy supplemented by fishing while Hjálmarsvík, its coastal neighbor, exploited a diversity of marine resources. Around AD 1300...