Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)
151-175 (233 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Photogrammetry has seen increasing utilization for artifact recordation and analysis in recent years but with the rise of this representational methodology has come several challenges including inaccurate reproduction of surfaces, and difficulties processing thin, transparent, or reflective objects. Emerging free open-source machine learning technology...
Of Water and Wood: the archaeology of wharfage and landmaking in the 18th-century Middle Atlantic (2025)
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. Changes to the landscape brought on by European colonialism are well studied, but those changes did not stop at land’s end. The amphibious nature of European colonialism necessitated vast terrestrial resources to support aquatic connections across empire. This amphibious colonialism is especially apparent in the material...
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...
People Moving Pottery: Modeling the Circulation of Fourmile Polychrome in East-central Arizona (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pedestrians: Current Research in GIS-Based Movement Modeling for Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Southwest archaeologists have long relied on the exchange and movement of decorated pottery to infer cultural boundaries, migrations, and broader social networks. However, little investigation has been done on the processes or paths used to transport pottery within these social networks. The...
Personhood of Place in the Central Andes: Syncretism & Subversive Landscapes at the Cosma Complex, Peru. (2025)
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 Cosma Complex is a multicomponent center located in the upper Nepeña River Valley, Ancash Peru, western flank of the Cordillera Negra Mountains. Archaeological field work over the past decade has documented repeated use throughout a 5000 year occupation, with historic accounts establishing the founding of the...
Pitfalls and Potentials of Paleoenvironmental Modeling at the Quarter Century (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 2" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our ability to model paleoenvironments has improved dramatically over the last 25 years with improved technologies, new insights, and growing databases of proxy information. Oftentimes, the data we harness for archaeological modeling has been collected by interdisciplinary colleagues who pursue different questions, scales,...
Political Complexity and Gendered Violence in the Andes – A Bayesian Approach (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nature of violence in the pre-modern past remains an enduring question in anthropological research. In this study, we investigate the potential relationship between sociopolitical organization and the frequency and type of violence experienced by adult males and females in Andean archaeological contexts. For this study we establish four broad...
Political Economy in Neighborhood Public Space at Angamuco, Michoacan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ways to Do, Ways to Inhabit, Ways to Interact: An Archaeological View of Communities and Daily Life" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper looks at changes in the relationships between elites and commoners in neighborhood public spaces at the site of Angamuco, Michoacan, Mexico, drawing from a combination of Marxian political economy and collective action theory. The study uses a combination of viewshed analysis,...
The Political Landscape of a Pre-Hispanic Tairona Chiefdom Community in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta: Settlement Patterns, Conflict, and Decision Making in the Río Frío Basin, Colombia. (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 2" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The present proposal seeks, through an analysis of settlement patterns, conflict and decision-making, to evaluate the conformation of a political landscape in a pre-Hispanic Tairona chiefdom community from the 1st century AD to the 16th century AD in the mountainous foothills of the Río Frío basin, Sierra Nevada de Santa...
Population Dynamics in Interior Alaska and Yukon: Demographic Reconstruction with a Regional Taphonomic Correction (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Northern Dene Athabascan areas of interior Alaska and Yukon Territory have some of the oldest evidence for human occupation in North America spanning up to 14,000 years ago. It is still unclear exactly what drives population fluctuation in this region as there were many environmental changes happening throughout time. This research uses radiocarbon dates...
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,...
Precipitation Variability, Age at Death, and Metabolic Stress over 3,000 Years in the Ancient Andes (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate change is an immediate and pressing global issue with wide ranging consequences. Research on living populations, though important, may fail to capture the range of possible human behavioral and biological responses to climate change. The cultural breadth and temporal depth of archaeological and bioarchaeological research offers a window into how...
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...
Prehistoric Hookworm and the Peopling of the Americas: Enhancing Theories Based on Paleoclimate Models and Pathogens (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans brought many things with them when they came to the Americas. This study focuses on hookworms and domesticated dogs to revise, constrain, or enhance theoretical models of when and how humans first came to the Americas. The hookworm life cycle is critically dependent upon the environmental conditions and proximity to suitable hosts. Its eggs leave...
Prioritizing Site Loss in the Delaware Bay, USA, Using Probabalistic Modeling (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Delaware Bay is the second largest estuary along the US Atlantic coast and is experiencing some of the gravest effects from climate-driven sea level rise along the East Coast. Certain areas along the bay have the lowest mean elevation in the USA and are experiencing both accelerated sea level...
An R Package for a Generative-Inference Based Cultural Evolutionary Analysis (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. Since the seminal works by Neiman (1995) and Shennan & Wilkinson (2001), evolutionary archaeologists and anthropologists have been trying to infer social learning strategies by analysing the temporal frequency of different cultural variants in a population. These early applications directly employed...
Recent Developments in Small and Low-Cost 3D Scanning Systems (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Small and inexpensive alternatives for capturing three-dimensional (3D) data have continued to proliferate. Previous 3D capture systems included specialized Google and Sony smartphones, the Scanse Sweep, and the moderately expensive DotProduct DPI-8X handheld scanner. This poster examines developments in the low-cost scanner arena during the last two years...