Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wetherbee Dorshow. Michael Heckenberger.

In the southern Amazon, two decades of rapid agro-pastoral development, extreme drought, and forest fires in the "arc of deforestation" threaten to precipitate an ecological oscillation of southern transitional forests from an eco-region dominated by closed tropical forest to one of open savanna and woodlands. Collaborative research conducted with the Kuikuro indigenous community in the Xingu River headwaters, involving archaeology, soil science, paleoecology, remote sensing, geospatial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Burns.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For settlement pattern analysis where territorial exclusion is assumed to be at play, Fretwell and Lucas's 1969 model is still the core explanation for IDD. Rather than focus on population density, it would be more in keeping with formal models of behavioral ecology to analyze the dynamic through marginal analysis. Established groups should defend...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Wilson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Agent-based modeling (ABM) has recently been applied by archaeologists to assist in the reconstruction of past societies. The ability to program agents to make decisions based on certain factors, such as landscape changes and cultural practices, allows researchers to explore issues such as settlement patterns, group interactions, subsistence practices,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kris Primeau.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reconstruction of the acoustic phenomena that characterize sites, features, and other landscape locations are broadening our understanding of the multifaceted perception of sound, meaning, and embodied experience in the past. However, models, simulations, and on-site experimentation and recording are frequently tied to extant buildings and landscape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Blackwood.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Virtual reality (VR) provides a powerful platform to disseminate, showcase and protect archaeological research; it is a relatively inexpensive tool that can be applied to the discipline of archaeology by offering a new way to analyze and visualize archaeological sites as they once were. VR can immerse the user in the simulated environment, allow them to walk...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Duenas-Garcia.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Salón de las Columnas at La Quemada, Zacatecas, stands as one of the largest roofed structures in Mesoamerica, showcasing impressive architectural complexity and monumental columns. Despite its significance, limited research has explored the detailed construction techniques and ceremonial functions of this space. This study aims to reconstruct the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ishmael Medina. Brian Codding. Kenneth Vernon. Jerry Spangler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maize (Zea mays) was one of the most widespread domesticated plants in the Americas before European colonization. Despite its widespread distribution, explaining how and why ancient maize farming spread into Utah remains a central research question in Southwest archaeology. To understand how ancient maize spread, we need a comprehensive suitability model...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Fries.

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. The ancient Maya settlements of the Aguacate region of western Belize feature a dispersed settlement pattern spread across a highly varied landscape. Both soil and water resources are unevenly distributed across the region, interspersed with karst outcrops and ridges. Nonetheless,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Perron.

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. <html> Many rivers in the Amazon are entrenched below the surrounding uplands. This entrenchment, which likely stems from climate variations during Quaternary glacial cycles, shields much of the uplands from seasonal flooding and probably encouraged dispersal of early human inhabitants. It is difficult to measure the extent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Davies. Matthew Douglass.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Concepts from resilience theory (RT) have been variously applied in studies of the deep human past. Given emphasis on cross-scale interactions and cyclical trajectories, RT provides a framework to interpret historical sequences in terms of general ecological processes. However, less consideration has been given to the interface between the trajectories of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sam Lin.

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Rolland and Dibble synthesis was an ambitious attempt to reframe the interpretation of Middle Paleolithic variability. The model postulates that Middle Paleolithic assemblage variability is continuous in nature, driven principally by raw material availability and occupation intensity....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Buckner.

This is an abstract from the "Vicksburg Is the Key: Recent Archaeological Investigations and New Perspectives from the Gibraltar of the South" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. HDR’s recent investigations in Vicksburg National Military Park (VNMP) identified multiple precontact sites composed of extensive ceramic scatters. A typological analysis of nearly 300 sherds suggests these occupations are associated with the transitional Coles Creek culture...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Harrower.

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. Least Cost Path (LCP) Modeling, often performed by Geographic Information System (GIS) software, has had important impacts in archaeology over the past few decades. Optimality centered models of human behavior have been criticized for overemphasizing the role of energetic efficiency. However, it is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erick Robinson. Jacob Freeman. Robert Kelly.

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. Many archaeological radiocarbon time-series throughout the world display a decline of radiocarbon date frequencies from ca. 900-600 cal BP. In this presentation we examine alternative hypotheses that may explain these trends. We analyze whether dramatic declines in radiocarbon date frequencies are due to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Kara.

The Classic Maya collapse remains as both relevant and controversial a topic as ever. For over a century, dozens of researchers have proposed different causes that may have driven this complex process. The last few decades have witnessed the academic community’s opinion converge on the notion that many different social and environmental factors, operating at likewise diverse scales, somehow contributed to a temporally gradual and spatially heterogeneous disruption of the demographic, political,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Rorabaugh.

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. Nontraditional tools and mediums can provide unique methodological and interpretive opportunities for archaeologists. In this case, the Unreal Engine (UE), which is typically used for games and media, has provided a powerful tool for non-programmers to engage with 3D visualization and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerardo Aldana. Marcus Thomson. Thomas Thelen. Toni Gonzalez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In "The Forms of Capital," Pierre Bourdieu writes: “[t]he social world is accumulated history, and if it is not to be reduced to a discontinuous series of instantaneous mechanical equilibria between agents who are treated as interchangeable particles, one must reintroduce into it the notion of capital and with it, accumulation and all its effects.” His attempt...

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 Jon Carroll.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Assyrian siege of Tel Lachish in 701BC was immortalized in stone reliefs that once decorated the walls of Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh. Archaeologists have long recognized the role these images played in glorifying Assyrian military and political power. The reliefs have also heavily influenced our interpretations of how the city of Tel Lachish was...

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:...