Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Giacomo Vinci.

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. Long before the development of Venice in the Middle Ages, late prehistoric communities had already established complex settlement patterns along the lagoon and transitional environments of the northern Adriatic coast (NE Italy). The prolonged and intensive occupation of these areas resulted in intricate landscape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Van Dyke.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wetherbee Dorshow.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lewis Borck. Corinne L. Hofman. Manfred Schäfer. Angus A. A. Mol. Daniel Weidele.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Brown.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Froese.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Carolina Zensen-Simoes.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological site of La Milpa North in Belize offers a unique opportunity for cutting-edge research in digital archaeology. Building on over a decade of excavation data (Heller 2018), this project focuses on creating an accurate digital reconstruction of the site as it appeared during the Maya Terminal Classic period (750-900 CE). Utilizing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kayeleigh Sharp.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Gauthier.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dylan Davis.

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. Environmental archaeology provides important insights to the long-term consequences of different human-ecological dynamics. Recent research has shown that historic and ancient patterns of human land-use can have lasting impacts to ecosystems. However, discerning between different land-use activities in the past remains...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Mesia-Montenegro.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In our research, we have identified over 113 geoglyphs in the middle Chillon Valley, located on the Andean Central Coast, with chronological spans ranging from the Formative Period (1800–100 BC) to the Inka Period (AD 1470–1532). This project utilized advanced digital technologies, including Remotely Piloted Airborne Systems (RPAS), to systematically...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik R. Otárola-Castillo.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Isaac Ullah.

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. In a recent meta-analysis of archaeological GIS publication trends (Ullah, Clow, and Meling, 2024), my colleagues and I determined that the major focus in archaeological GIS advancement has been methodological rather than theoretical and that GIS cannot yet be considered a paradigm for spatial thinking in archaeology...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Filippo Brandolini.

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. Historic agricultural practices have shaped landscapes, creating a heritage that is crucial for sustainable development. Agriculture, as the largest form of land use, has profoundly impacted ecosystems worldwide since ancient times. Pre-industrial systems like terrace farming and agroforestry, once valued for their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Tiffany. Shirley J. Schermer.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elspeth Ready. Michael Holton Price.

This is an abstract from the "The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Human Origins: Archaeological Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades of research in human behavioral ecology (HBE) demonstrates that questions about human ecological and reproductive adaptations generally lead to questions about cooperation. Partly for this reason, much recent research in HBE has focused on issues such as marriage, cooperative child raising, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Druggan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maize was ubiquitous in eastern North America at the time of European contact; however, the timing and trajectory of its introduction and adoption by communities across the region remain unclear. Recent redating of collections previously reported to support Middle Woodland maize have rejected original interpretations by either yielding dates centuries...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Davies.

This is an abstract from the "Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Current debates over migration and mobility in Pacific prehistory hinge on the capacity of mariners to sail to windward. With this ability, voyages between any two points were possible, with ease of travel conditioned on the favorability of winds. Without it, movement in any given direction was dependent on winds traveling along a similar path, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Wai.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a public fascination with the roleplay of an archaeologist. Just as fantasy games feature hyperfictionalized medieval warriors or detectives and superheroes in fiction are vigilantes, so too is there an idea of a hyperfictional archaeologist without its mundanities. While archaeologists have critiqued the problematic nature of archaeology in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Howey.

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. <html> Movement has featured in archaeological GIS efforts to analyze social uses of landscape since the start. Important work has focused on Least Cost Paths. However, dividing landscapes into a binary of key sites to be connected and a matrix of land between does not always capture the scope of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corey Hoover.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The built environment is not a simple, haphazardly constructed idea. The human condition and cultural components, combined with environmental factors have undoubtedly influenced the built environment situated within landscapes. Not only are these landscapes environmental, but also social. In addition, these landscapes are not static and are subject to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Nabity. Jacob Freeman. Dave Byers. Erick Robinson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The intensification of production by human groups has occurred at various times around the globe. Intensification correlates with increases in population size, increased labor investment in food production, and decreased residential mobility; the opposite (de-intensification) correlates with decreases in population size, decreased labor investments in food...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Osterholtz. D. Shane Miller.

This is an abstract from the "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Site of Sacred Ridge has the earliest identified Extreme Processing assemblage in the four corners region, with over 14,000 fragments of human bone (representing at least 33 individuals) deposited in two pit structures around AD 810. During excavation, over 9,000 point locations were taken with a total station. During...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Turley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long used architectural energetics to better understand the relationships between labor organization, political power, and materiality in pre-modern societies. The sixteenth-century Spanish invasion of the Andes caused unprecedented societal upheaval and, in the 1580s, the physical upheaval of people as the Toledan reducción system...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Hammer.

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. The study of ancient states and empires has often suffered from an under-appreciation of internal spatial/temporal variability in material culture and means of territorial control. Spatial network conceptions facilitate a better understanding of ancient states and empires’ development and forms of...