Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)
201-225 (233 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This work locates trails in Florida's Western Okeechobee. This Everglade landscape has long been viewed as an inhospitable combination of sloughs, swamps, and sawgrass. Trail networks connected communities and allowed people to travel, exchange materials, and share ideology. This work applies multiple data sources to over 11,000 km2 to find potential...
The Spatial Structure of a Pre-Roman Highland Fortified Landscape (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. This paper presents a transferable approach developed to study the highland fortified landscape of the pre-Roman Samnite society during the first millennium BCE in central Italy. It integrates extensive primary data acquisition through LiDAR-based remote sensing with spatial statistics to identify the subsistence strategies...
SPD Analysis Sheds Light on North Spanish Mesolithic Demography (2024)
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...
Sperm Whales and Neolithic Whaling Socieites along the Coasts of Atlantic Europe (2019)
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...
Stream Network Analysis in Archaeological Predictive Modeling (2023)
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...
Style vs. Function in Polynesian Fish Hook Shank Variation (2018)
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...
Teaching Archaeology in Virtual Reality: Project Ambrosia (2019)
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...
Testing Dunnell’s Waste Explanation for Monument Building with an Agent-Based Model (2018)
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...
The Ties that Bind: Integrating Archaeological, Ethnographic, and Computational Models of Movement across the Great Bend of the Gila in Southern Arizona (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. Cultural landscapes are amalgamations of places, resources, and peoples’ lives, as well as the ties that bind them together, such as sense-sheds (visual, auditory, etc.) and routes of movement. Landscape archaeologists tend to rely on computational models of viewsheds and optimal paths to approximate the immaterial and...
Timber Pilgrimage: Timber Importation as Pilgrimage to Chaco Canyon (2019)
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...
Tools for Quantitative Archaeology: Spreading Numeracy to a Generation of Southwestern Archaeologists (2019)
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...
Toward an Epidemiological Model of Sarcoptic Mange among Andean Camelids (2021)
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...
Towards a Wave-of-Advance Model for Predicting the Spread of Prismatic Blade Technology in Mesoamerica (2018)
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...
Tracking Cattle and Cowboys in the Colonial Maya Landscape (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. Commercial cattle ranching fundamentally transformed and continues to transform the landscape of the northern Maya lowlands in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Many of these transformations trace their origins to a period of accelerated dispossession from the 1700s until 1847, when Indigenous Maya uprisings led to the...
Traversing the Great Forest: Work and Mobility in Sweden’s Premodern Farmscape (2019)
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....
Updated Perspectives on Sennacherib’s Siege at Tel Lachish (2023)
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...
An Updated Radiocarbon Chronology of the Middle to Late Woodland Transition in Southern Ontario: Regional Variation in the Dynamics of Cultural Change (2019)
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...
Using Agent-Based Models to Explore How Behavior Affects Archaeological Networks (2024)
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...
Using Food Web Models to Examine Desert Networks in the American Southwest and Western Australia (2018)
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...
Using Predictive Modeling to Evaluate Changes in Great Basin Paleoindian Settlement Systems through Time (2023)
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...
Using Predictive Modeling to Proactively Avoid Sites for Natural Resources Conservation Service Practices in Southern New Mexico (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the United States Department of Agriculture lies the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Its mission is to aid American Farmers through a variety of assistance programs. Archaeological work is intimately intwined in carrying out these programs. While it is necessary and good work, often the Archaeological work can slow or halt program...
Using Quantitative Methods to Assess Network Change in Coupled Human/Natural Systems (2019)
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...
The Variable Resilience of Large and Small Holdings on the Svalbard Estate, NE Iceland: A Multidisciplinary Study of Farm Abandonments Circa AD 1300 (2018)
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...
A View from the Mountains: A Test of a Predictive Model in the Southern Wind River Range, Wyoming (2018)
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...
Virtual Reality and Archaeological Practice (2023)
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,...