Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)
26-50 (233 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Partners at Work: Promoting Archaeology and Collaboration in the Chiricahua Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the goals of the Student Conservation Association (SCA) is to develop the next generation of conservation leaders. While the focus is often on natural resources, cultural resources, as a nonrenewable resource, have, until recently, been neglected. Chiricahua NM has been partnering with the SCA...
Boom-and-Bust Population Dynamics: Climate Change, Resource Inequality, and Intergroup Conflict in the Prehistoric North American Southwest (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the transition to agricultural economies human populations underwent profound changes including, in many regions, rapid growth accompanied by marked volatility. The Colorado Plateau in western North America offers unique insights into volatile population dynamics, as it represents one of the few...
Broadscale Machine Learning Model for Archaeological Feature Detection in the Maya Area (2023)
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Comprehensive maps of ancient structures across the Maya area of Central America can help archaeologists to deepen knowledge of past settlement patterns and regional interactions, potentially leading to enhanced understanding of thousands of years of Maya civilization. However, most Maya archaeological sites are not...
Building Nearest Neighbor Models of Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems Using Four Case Studies for the Northwest Coast of North America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spatial analysis of settlement patterns have traditionally focused on hierarchical city states. Seldom do settlement pattern studies use spatial statistics to characterize hunter-gatherer settlement systems. Through the application of nearest neighbor analysis this paper characterizes the settlement patterns for four sub-regions of the Northwest Coast of North...
Can We Predict Archaeological Site Location? Should We? (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological predictive models, whether formal or informal, are commonly used on compliance-driven projects, but their efficacy is rarely tested. Too often, we assume that models are “good” or “successful” when more sites are discovered in “high-probability” than in “low-probability” zones. In Florida, state...
The Centrality of Saplings: Trees and Archaeoecological Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Often when we examine past ecologies we focus on food webs--what people ate, and how people were connected to larger trophic entanglements. However, by analyzing the networks that form around the myriad uses beyond food of other biota we can see how humans embed themselves in and structure ecologies worldwide. As part of the...
Changes to the Western Eurasian Hominin Climate Niche (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The climate niches that early modern humans and our earlier hominin ancestors inhabited have undergone major changes over time. This study documents climate niche expansions, contractions, and stationarity across four time periods (Last Interglacial, Last Glacial Maximum, Mid-Holocene, and 1950¬–2000) in western Eurasia. Using spatially gridded global...
Chronometric Evidence Does Not Support Cahokia’s “Big Bang” (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cahokia was the largest pre-contact Indigenous population center north of Mexico, and its development and dissolution are tied in myriad ways to numerous communities across the American Southeast and Midwest. Most current scholarship emphasizes a “Big Bang” which models the emergence of Cahokia as a profound and rapid event at ca. AD 1050 characterized by...
Climate Change and Rural Livelihood in Calabria, Italy (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Making Historical Archaeology Matter: Rethinking an Engaged Archaeology of Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Rural Communities of Western Ireland and Southern Italy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how human activity, climate systems, ecosystems, and earth surface processes interact to change the capacity for different human livelihoods over time is crucial to finding livable strategies for coping with...
Climate Change and the Foraging-Farming Transition on the Great Plains (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. The foraging lifestyle persisted as the major human subsistence strategy worldwide for most of the human career. With notable exceptions, this way of life was eventually replaced by a subsistence base complemented and often dominated by cultivated foods. Archaeologists have proposed several hypotheses to explain this...
Climate Teleconnections Synchronize Human Population Dynamics (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Human Population Dynamics, Innovation, and Ecosystem Change" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate variability can significantly constrain the population dynamics of ancient agrarian societies, although its direct influence is often mediated by a complex interplay of social, ecological, and technological factors. Untangling these relationships in the archaeological record is challenging due to...
Competing with the Crown: Early Spanish Mission Settlement Decisions in a Human Behavioral Ecology Model (2018)
Models developed from principles in human behavioral ecology have long benefited archaeological research. Drawing on natural features in the modern landscape, locations of prehistoric settlements can be evaluated in terms of calculable suitability. Such models also have predictive potential, as they can rank loci in terms of any combination of environmental conditions appropriate to the archaeological context being investigated. Where available, careful examination of ethnohistoric and...
A Computational Approach to Initial Social Complexity: Göbekli Tepe and Neolithic Polities in Urfa Region, Upper Mesopotamia, Tenth Millennium BC (2018)
Extensive archaeological field work and multidisciplinary research in recent decades shows that communities of sedentary hunter-gatherers during the tenth millenium BC built the earliest presently known monumental structures during the PPNA (ca. 9600–8800 BC) at the ceremonial site of Göbekli Tepe and nearby PPNB settlement sites in present-day Urfa province, southeastern Turkey. However, the earliest evidence of agriculture dates to a later period (early PPNB, ca. 8750 BC, terminus post quem)...
Computational approaches to a sustainable heritage management of Central Asian Archaeological Landscapes (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 Central Asian Archaeological Landscape (CAAL) project is building a geo-spatial inventory of archaeological resources for Central Asia. CAAL is developing a two-platform system that addresses the needs of end users. The graph database Arches platform, developed by the Getty Conservation Institute, is being employed for...
Computational Models of Human Settlement Behavior: An Overview of Current Methods and Motivations (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Computational models of human settlement have been noticeable features of intra- and interdisciplinary research for several decades, whether such models focus on the present day, on the historically documented near-present, or on deeper archaeological time scales. Now is a useful moment to revisit the pedigree of these different...
Computer Vision Best Practices in Computational Archaeology (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. Landscape archaeology has progressed enormously in recent years thanks to the introduction of computer vision (CV) new technologies (Argyrou and Agapiou, 2022). Besides, Machine Learning (ML) has demonstrated its application to other archaeological fields beyond site detection (Berganzo-Besga et al., 2021), for example, the...
Contribution to Rock Art Interpretation with New Decipherments of Hand Prints (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discovery during the 1990’s of an unexpected large rock art field in East Kalimantan, East Borneo, containing more than 2000 negative hand prints, has led to a different approach of the possible function(s) of this materialization of specific procedures. It has permitted researchers to look for practical interpretations of decipherment of sex gender on...
Creating Machine Learning Models Using Historical Maps to Identify the Places In-Between (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historical archaeology lies at the intersection of the written word, the spoken word, and material things. We extend and enhance that purview by incorporating machine learning algorithms to create more dynamic assessments of places documented on historical maps, thus engaging more deeply with sociocultural and environmental...
Cultivation to Agricultural landscapes in the Bolivian Amazon (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 Bolivian Amazon has been inhabited since the very early Holocene. People have been transforming the landscape ever since, leaving permanent markers. As one of the very early centres of plant domestication, the cultivation of squashes (Cucurbita sp.) and cassava (Manihot sp.) date to more than 10,000 years ago, while...
Cutting Through the Networks: An Assessment of the Circulation of Singular Artifacts in Prehistoric Iberia (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. In this paper, we aim to analyze a collection of singular artifacts recovered from various sites in the Iberian Peninsula, spanning from the Early Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age (approximately 5600–1800 BCE). Our primary focus will be on investigating the patterns of circulation and exchange of polished axes and...
Data Inconsistency and Multi-Site Analyses: Using Multilevel Modeling to Transform Archaeological Data (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For over a century, the proliferation of archaeological excavations in the United States has generated a large amount of archaeological data. Much of this data is published in archaeological reports that are housed in state-run archives. These archives offer a wealth of information for scholars who explore research questions that require multi-site...
Dates as Data: Where Are We Now in Using Radiocarbon Dates to Infer Population Histories? (2018)
Archaeologists have long used site counts and other measures to infer past population histories and such efforts have always been criticised by those who point to all the known and unknown unknowns that in their view make such efforts as dubious as getting to the topmost steps on Hawkes’s ladder of inference. In recent years most effort has been devoted to the use of summed radiocarbon probabilities for demographic inference since for most of later prehistory in most of the world it gives a much...
Decomposing Habitat Suitability With Theory-Driven Machine-Learning (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological applications of ideal distribution models have advanced beyond the study of straightforward settlement decisions to address a variety of important but difficult anthropological questions. To aid in these investigations, we demonstrate a method for (i) decomposing habitat...
Deepdive: Using AI and Virtual Reality to Explore Ancient Submerged Civilizations (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Submerged Prehistoric Archaeology is a subdiscipline of archaeology that deals with the discovery of ancient submerged landscapes. In Europe alone over 3,000 submerged ancient sites are recorded. While there is an increased number of submerged sites in North America, the emphasis has on the study of shipwrecks and historical questions related to nautical...
Demography and Social Organization of the Cucuteni-Tripolye Populations: An Evolutionary Perspective (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper addresses the broad issue of population estimates as proxies and drivers of the evolution of social structures taking the example of the Cucuteni-Tripolye cultural complex (CTCC) covering a territory from the Eastern Carpathians to the Dnieper region...