Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Connor Johnen.

This paper details the results of archaeological survey in the Wind River Range, Wyoming between elevations of 9,000 and 11,000 ft. The purpose of this survey was to test a predictive model of a specific site type (sites referred to as villages) created by Stirn (2014) and tested by Stirn in a different region of the same mountain range. Although the methods of creating the predictive model were not altered, the survey methods were significantly altered. Random survey blocks were created within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Blackwood.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Virtual reality (VR) is a tool that offers an opportunity to approach archaeological analyses and communications through a different lens. VR provides a platform where data can be continuously updated and modified as is becomes available as well as adding an element of interactivity. VR allows the user to engage with a simulated environment, walk around,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Townsend.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of the Eastern Jemez Mountain Range and the Pajarito Plateau: Interagency Collaboration for Management of Cultural Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requires federal agencies to consider the effects of actions carried out on historic properties under their jurisdiction. In the instance of an undertaking that would diminish or remove important...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeline Mackie.

There has long been a debate about the frequency of megafauna hunting or dismemberment by early Paleoindians in North America. Proposed megafauna kill sites are heavily scrutinized. Sites which contain limited artifacts, but no projectile points are often discounted or classified as ‘possible’ kill sites due to their limited cultural materials. This begs the question, just how likely (or unlikely) are artifacts to be accidentally associated with megafauna remains? Using a computer model, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Wren. Curtis Marean. Eric Shook. Kim Hill. Marco Janssen.

This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Gram for gram, coastal shellfish have significant benefits over many terrestrial resources. They are higher in calories, fats, and proteins than most plants and are available in denser and more predictable patches than mammals. However, there are costs to foraging coastal shellfish....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Lanza. Amanuel Beyin. Erik R. Otárola-Castillo.

There is a broad paleoanthropological consensus that hominins left Africa multiple times during the Pleistocene, but the geographic routes through which they exited the continent remains unclear. Although the Sinai Land Bridge and the Strait of Bab-al-Mandab on the southern end of the Red Sea are commonly implicated as the likely pathways used by early humans during their expansion out of Africa, the evidence supporting each route is still much debated. Here, we identify viable pathways for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Igor Chechushkov.

The case study comes from the southern Urals, Russia. Since 1970’s the walled settlements of the Sintashta archaeological culture (2000-1700 BC) have been interpreted as the fortified towns and centers of social life for the religious and war leaders of the local communities. However, settlements’ primary locations on the bottoms of the rivers’ valleys, as well as lack of other evidence for the warfare, cause doubts about such interpretation. Analysis of natural environments (e.g., local wind,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C. Michael Barton. Julien Riel-Salvatore.

Mobility is a phenomenon of importance across all past and present societies. For hunter-gatherers, mobility structures ecological strategies, social organization, and response to environmental change. For prehistoric societies, we cannot observe mobility but it is possible to study it through a proxy record of discarded material items and biological remains that form the archaeological record. Increasingly archaeological practice has shifted from proposing intuitive links between mobility and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Rapes. Jesse Wolfhagen. Max Price. Erik R. Otárola-Castillo.

Zooarchaeologists contribute valuable data to the exploration of archaeology’s grand challenges. The scale and complexity of these problems requires zooarchaeologists to aggregate and analyze data using rigorous statistical methods while ensuring reproducibility and validity. Because assemblages can contain thousands of data points, conducting statistical analyses on all of the available data in a standardized fashion is difficult. ZooaRchGUI provides zooarchaeologists a free, user-friendly...