Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)
76-100 (184 Records)
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...
Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling of Early Maize in the Eastern Woodlands (2023)
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...
The Highways and Byways of the Winds: Exploring Sailing Capability and Climate Variability in Pacific Interaction (2019)
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...
Human-Environment Relationships and Spatial Organization in the Nepeña Valley, Ancash Peru (2024)
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...
Hunter-Gatherer Intensification and Long-Term Demography: A SW Wyoming Case Study (2019)
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...
Identifying Depositional Processes: Statistical Cluster Analysis at Sacred Ridge (2024)
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...
Improved Representation of Paddled Propulsion in a Deterministic Ocean Voyaging Model: Bronze Age Scandinavian Example (2023)
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. Here we describe the implementation of a realistic representation of paddling propulsion on a deterministic ocean voyaging computer model. Due to lack of quantified information on the impact of environmental parameters such as winds and currents on paddling, in a previous version of the...
Inca Hydrodynamics at the Chachabamba Archeological Site (Machu Picchu National Archeological Park, Peru) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Chachabamba archaeological site in the Machu Picchu National Archeological Park contains a unique water complex erected by the Incas. Based on archaeological investigations, it has been established that the function of this water complex was strictly ceremonial. The necessity to control water flow in an architectural context...
Incorporating Knowledge about Future Weather Conditions on Navigational Decisions in an Agent-Based Seafaring Simulation: Comparison to Simpler Navigation Strategies (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The efficiency and safety of ocean travel is greatly dependent on along-trip environmental conditions. Agent-based simulations that optimize routes based on expected environmental conditions have been used by the shipping industry and the sailboat racing community for decades. Some recent efforts in archaeology have used the latter models. Here I describe...
Integrating Archaeological Models and Data with Bayesian Data Assimilation (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological data are crucial for understanding how human societies shaped—and were shaped by—their biophysical environments. Yet these data are often sparse, noisy, and time averaged, making it difficult to uncover patterns of change across space and time. Process-based simulations are one way to fill the gaps in these imperfect proxy...
Integrating Categorical Legacy Data in Spatial Models: A Unique Dataset from Southeast Asia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite advances made in open access publishing, significant archaeological information remains confined to the grey literature or to unpublished, internal reports in the possession of institutions. For at least twenty years, archaeologists have realized that digital archiving could make this material more accessible at a larger scale, but the tools to...
Intentional Sustainability in Human Behavioral Ecology: Modeling Athabascan Caribou Predation (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The paradigm of Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) utilizes behavioral ecological models to understand the adaptive relationship between human behavior and the environment in which people reside. The introduction of intentional sustainability to HBE models benefits this paradigm by diversifying the factors that influence human behavior and developing a greater...
Internal Networks and the Materiality of Imported Gold in the Eastern Cordillera of Colombia (AD 600–1600) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Materials in Movement in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Muisca of the Eastern Cordillera of Colombia are known for making extensive use of imported gold to manufacture both votive metalwork and body ornamentation over a millennium. To better understand the materiality of this imported raw material, we present new computational models of the compositional datasets pertaining to Muisca...
Investigating the Sustainability of a Woodland Fish Trap on Florida’s Northern Gulf Coast (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE Stakes and Stones: Current Archaeological Approaches to Fish Weir Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The increase in frequency and intensity of storm events in the twenty-first century has inspired communities worldwide to reconsider their investment and approach to coastal infrastructure. As often is the case, modern problems serve to inspire archaeological inquiry. In this paper we explore the advantages...
Isolating the Principal Dimensions of Settlement (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. In regional investigations of settlement location the analyst typically assumes that appropriate variables have been identified—important variables have not been omitted and irrelevant ones have not been included—an assumption not always justified. The identification of a "minimum set" of location requirements is more...
Just Add Water: ENSO-Driven Ephemeral Agricultural Systems in the Arid Chapiyungas of Peru’s North Coast (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Water Management in the Andes: Past, Present, and Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Abrupt climatic changes caused by El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) bring profound ecological transformations to the Andean pacific coast. Archaeological research has largely focused on the impacts (which have been shown to be largely negative) of ENSO-positive phases, or “El Niños,” on complex socioecological systems in coastal...
Landscape Connectivity, Habitat Suitability and Cultural Transmission during the Last Glacial Maximum in Western Europe (2018)
During the Last Glacial Maximum the population of Western Europe contracted its range as the climate became less hospitable and more unpredictable. Mobility decisions must have been a key part of human adaptation during this time but are notoriously difficult to extract from archaeological data. Agent-based modelling offers one way to explore human mobility heuristically, producing test implications that can be tested using the archaeological record. We use a model of habitat suitability derived...
Landscape Modification and Agricultural Production on Cerro Ahumada, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studying agricultural productivity and intensification elucidates the behavioral and demographic patterns of past societies. By understanding how physical environments were modified for agricultural use, it is possible to determine key economic and social processes. This paper presents the results of the analysis of terraces associated with the Epiclassic...
Lessons Learned from Simulating Precolumbian Canoe Travel in Eastern North America (2024)
This is an abstract from the "What’s Canoe? Recent Research on Dugouts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. David Hurst Thomas (1972) described how model building and simulation can lead to serendipitous discoveries, that is findings that were not originally intended. In several projects to simulate cost distance of canoe travel in eastern North America, most of the memorable and impactful lessons have been a result of serendipity. This paper will...
Let the Crops Speak for Themselves: How to Avoid Imposing Agroecological Assumptions at Altar de Sacrificios (2023)
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. Any sizable population must be sustained by an adequate food supply. As such, estimates for high population densities in the Maya Lowlands must be met with an equal or greater productive capacity. The “Provisioning Ancient Maya Cities” symposium seeks to understand this on a...
Leveraging Behavioral Ecology to Understand the Relationship between Resource Availability and Human Violence (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Violence is a pervasive feature of human prehistory, and its traces can be found throughout the archaeological record. Collective violence has important effects on individual survival and is thought to play a critical role in the evolution of complex social systems. However, participation in coalitionary violence elicits a collective action problem and...
Lidar Predictive Modeling of Kalapuya Mound Sites in the Calapooia Watershed, Oregon (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Future Directions for Archaeology and Heritage Research in the Willamette Valley, Oregon" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation details the development, testing, and results of a lidar and remote sensing predictive model to locate precontact mound sites in the Calapooia Watershed in the Willamette Valley, Oregon. Not much is known about these mound sites archaeologically, including where they are located in...
Macroscopic Comparative Studies of Archaeological Data: Spatiotemporal Variability in Lithic Technology of Paleolithic Asia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Comparative studies using archaeological data on a broad spatiotemporal scale can provide an overview for investigating significant questions in human history and can promote discussions among scholars from different disciplines. This talk will present the results of a quantitative analysis of lithic technologies from the...
Managing the Current Mass Extinction for Human Populations (2019)
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. Recent analyses of large sample of radiocarbon ages illustrate the potential of these records to investigate general problems in human ecology. While much of the current literature focuses on the relationship between local ecology shifts and population booms or busts, no one has yet to address the general...
Marginality and Opportunity in the Deserts of Chicama, Peru: Perspectives from Integrated Archaeology, Remote Sensing, and Paleoclimatic Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Broad regions of Peru’s coastal desert are now highly adverse marginal environments, yet archaeological evidence indicate these settings often were used extensively in the past. Using a time-series analysis of Sentinel 1 and 2 remote sensing data, we document surface and groundwater resources that developed in the normally hyperarid desert margins of the...