Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)
51-75 (184 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this study we propose the use of agent-based modelling (ABM) and cellular automata (CA) to test the impact of predator-prey relationships on the distribution of prehistoric human populations. Our research goal is to establish a dynamic model of the distribution of large herbivores that constituted the main food source for...
Ecologies of Space and Time: The Shared History of Humans and Fire in the Jemez Mountains, NM (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ann F. Ramenofsky: Papers in Honor of a Non-Normative Career" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the southwestern US humans and ecosystems share a history of fire. An integrated archaeo-ecological framework offers an important interpretive lens for both archaeologists and ecologists. Contemporary ecological patterns and processes that are thought to be ‘native’ or ‘natural’ may in fact be highly influenced by past...
The Ecology of Agglomeration and the Rise of Chaco Great Houses (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decisions individuals make about where to live have profound consequences for everything from climate and conflict, to migration, inequality, the origins of agriculture, and urban development. It is not surprising that understanding and explaining those decisions remains an open and active area of research within archaeology. Many of the important...
The Effect of Climate Change on the Niche Space of North American Proboscideans (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. Most researchers agree that the extinction events of North American megafauna, including proboscideans, occurred approximately 13,000 years ago. The reason for the demise of these creatures, in particular proboscideans such as mammoth and mastodon, is a matter of debate. There are three accepted general hypotheses explaining...
The Effects of ENSO on Travel along the Pacific Coast of the Americas (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, prehistoric contacts have been suggested between Ecuador and western Mexico, occurring from 400 BC, if not earlier, to the sixteenth century based on similarities in mortuary behaviors, ceramic technology, language, and ethnohistoric accounts, and other lines of evidence. However, the frequency of these...
Epigraphy and the Archaeology of Settlement in the Dolores Region, Peten, Guatemala (2019)
This is an abstract from the "At the Interface the Use of Archaeology and Texts in Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper summarizes recent research into the timing, distribution, and causes of ancient Maya settlement in the area of Dolores, Peten, Guatemala, in the western Maya Mountains. Integrating evidence from hieroglyphic inscriptions, ceramic studies, and GIS modeling of least-cost pathways and viewsheds, I propose an...
Erosion and Agricultural Resilience in the Formative Teotihuacan Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Formative Period, the Teotihuacan Valley’s population was dispersed in small farming settlements in the piedmont slopes surrounding the valley bottom. The end of this period witnessed a dramatic population shift, with the Valley’s inhabitants clustering near perennial streams on the valley floor, along with thousands of new migrants. Erosion is...
Estimating the Effect of Endogenous Spatial Dependency with a Hierarchical Bayesian CAR Model on Archaeological Site Location Data (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research presents a method to test the endogenous spatial correlation effect when modeling the landscape sensitivity for archaeological sites. The effects of endogenous spatial correlation are inferred using a Hierarchical Bayesian model with an Conditional Auto-Regressive (CAR) component to better understand the...
Evaluating Differential Animal Carcass Transport Decisions at Regional Scales using Bayesian Mixed-Effects Models (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zooarchaeologists frequently face the problem of explaining uneven skeletal element representation, with explanations involving either non-human taphonomic agents or differential carcass transport decisions made by humans. Existing statistical methods for evaluating these explanations are generally applicable at the...
Evaluating the Efficacy of Regression and Machine Learning Models to Predict Prehistoric Land-use Patterns (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology II (QUANTARCH II)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists continue to rely on predictive models that suffer from the same errors that have plagued the discipline for decades: small training sets, improper statistical techniques, and vague or only implicit theory. To address these shortcomings, we develop a framework for modeling archaeological site occurrences with...
Evaluating the Impacts of Past Climate Change on Demographic and Subsistence Patterns in the Basin-Plateau Region of Western North America (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. Archaeological and paleoclimatological research increasingly reveal long-term impacts of past climate on human subsistence, settlement, and demography, yet positive results are debated and the underlying dynamics structuring these correlations remain questioned. Coupling a comprehensive dataset of radiocarbon-dated...
Evolution for the People: Big Data, Big Software, and How Compliance Archaeology is the Missing Link of Evolutionary Archaeology (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 growing concern in archaeology is the potential inaccessibility of various methodological and theoretical approaches in non-academic contexts. Open access and open source software (R, Quantum GIS, ImageJ) provide means for applying complex analyses within a budget, but due to cybersecurity...
Evolution of the Anthropocene (2018)
Why did humans, unlike any other multicellular species in the history of the Earth, gain the capacity to shift Earth into a new epoch of geologic time, the Anthropocene? Here, a general causal theory, sociocultural niche construction, is presented to explain long-term changes in Earth’s ecology driven by societal dynamics across human generational time through sociocultural evolution of subsistence regimes based on cooperative ecosystem engineering, social specialization, non-kin exchange and...
Explaining Paleoindian Settlement in the Intermountain West: A Regression Adjustment Approach (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Far West Paleoindian Archaeology: Papers from the Next Generation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Identifying the ecological drivers of Paleoindian settlement has broad implications for a host of related behaviors, including colonization, mobility, and subsistence. Unfortunately, important proxies like spatial site patterning suffer from well-known sampling biases, most notably, taphonomic decay, opportunistic survey,...
Explaining Variation in the Scale of Neolithic Quarry and Mine Production (2018)
In recent years new methods have been developed for using summed radiocarbon probabilities as a population proxy and for comparing radiocarbon datasets to establish whether they are significantly different from one another, while taking into account sampling variation and the patterns in the calibration curve. On the basis of newly collected and updated radiocarbon data on the dating of Neolithic mines and quarries in in Britain, Ireland and continental Northwest Europe, the paper will present...
Exploring Biological Sex Inequality through Mortuary Practices at Teotihuacan: A Machine Learning Approach (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Individualities have been difficult to identify in Classic Period Teotihuacan, as this multiethnic urban culture presents itself as a faceless society where inequality must be addressed with new perspectives and methodologies. In this poster, we explore whether this inequality is perceptible through biological sex differentiation in mortuary evidence,...
Exploring the Chacoan Landscape of the North American Southwest (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Developments and Challenges in Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Chaco Canyon, in the North American Southwest, is well-known for its monumental architecture and carefully choreographed landscape. Chaco Canyon lies at the heart of a 60,000 square mile area that contains some 200 additional major great house communities, as well as features such as roads,...
Finding Sites in the Amazon Forest: AI-Based Deep Learning Analysis of Satellite Imagery from the Upper Xingu Basin, Brazil (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper summarizes preliminary results of an AI-based analysis that identifies potential precolumbian Amazonian archaeological site locations based on the presence of clusters of a specific species of palm tree. The study uses Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, and Planet satellite imagery as...
Fingerprints of Community: Decolonizing Archaeological Data Analysis through Networks (2018)
This paper uses the Nexus 1492 database, built over approximately 30 years of fieldwork, to examine ceramic attribute variability throughout the Antillean Islands. Regional ceramic analyses often focus on the construction of ceramic typologies that are then used to compare typological proportions, differences, and similarities at various spatial resolutions across temporal periods. Long-standing critiques of the use of typologies and taxonomies in archaeology (sensu Brew 1946; Gnecco and...
Formal Theory in Demographic Temporal Frequency Analysis: Decomposing the TFD Data Generating Process (2018)
John Rick’s 1987 paper in American Antiquity presented the first systematic overview of theory underlying the "dates as data" approach (i.e., demographic temporal frequency analysis, dTFA), describing the general outline of a data generating process (DGP) linking paleopopulation dynamics to temporal distributions of archaeological materials (temporal frequency distributions, tfds). While research pursued in the dTFA framework has gained momentum over the intervening decades, questions regarding...
From Collective Government to Communal Inebriation in Ancient Teotihuacan, Central Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A simulation model of Teotihuacan’s hypothetical collective government has shown that a highly distributed network of leaders could have been effective at ensuring social coordination in the city by means of consensus formation. The model makes a strong prediction: it indicates that this collective mode of government would have been most effective in...
Gallinazo Networks: Economic Complementarity and the Persistence of Gallinazo-Mochica Social Interrelationships (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early archaeological works that overemphasized societal elites and funerary contexts have led to several biases that limit comprehension of society’s lower-echelon, or their roll in quotidian social spheres (political, religious or economic) during the latter part of the first millennium on Peru’s north coast. This is a topic of much interest when considering...
Generalized Additive Mixed Models for Archaeological Networks (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. Distance is a fundamental constraint on human social interaction. This basic principle motivates the use of spatial interaction models for estimating flows of people, information, and resources on spatial and social networks. These models have both valid dynamical and statistical interpretations, a key strength well supported...
Ghosts of Climates Past: Evaluating the Effects of Climate Change on the Foraging Ecology of Paleoindian Hunter-Gatherers in the North American Great Plains (2018)
The environment has a strong influence on the evolutionary ecology of hunter-gatherer foraging. Studies of prehistoric hunter-gatherers have often made hypotheses regarding the effect of climate on foraging strategies, but have rarely tested those hypotheses. The absence of explicit hypothesis testing has been partly due to a dearth of operationalized paleoenvironmental variables. Although paleoenvironmental reconstructions have been abundant, particularly those based on pollen, they have mostly...
The Glenwood Phase Settlement System Revisited (2018)
One of Larry Zimmerman’s lasting contributions to archaeology is his research on the Central Plains tradition Glenwood culture in southwest Iowa. New site seriations, AMS radiocarbon dating, and site modeling utilizing GIS, all address fundamental assumptions derived from Zimmerman’s research in the 1970s. The current model proposes a short-term occupation consisting primarily of dispersed farmsteads and possibly two or three unfortified house clusters in the Glenwood locality. Site location is...