Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling (Other Keyword)

26-50 (184 Records)

Broadscale Machine Learning Model for Archaeological Feature Detection in the Maya Area (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Leila Character. Tim Beach. Takeshi Inomata. Thomas Garrison. Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach.

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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only James Brown. Galen Miller-Atkins.

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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason O'Donoughue.

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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefani Crabtree.

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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Nicholson.

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...


Climate Change and Rural Livelihood in Calabria, Italy (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Isaac Ullah. Meredith Chesson. Paula Lazrus. Kostalena Michelaki.

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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Angel Nihells. Melissa G. Torquato. John Rapes. Matthew E. Hill. Erik Otárola-Castillo.

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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Gauthier. Darcy Bird.

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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Triozzi.

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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudio Cioffi-Revilla. Niloofar Bagheri-Jebelli.

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 Models of Human Settlement Behavior: An Overview of Current Methods and Motivations (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Bevan.

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...


Contribution to Rock Art Interpretation with New Decipherments of Hand Prints (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jean-Michel Chazine.

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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsey Cochran. Grant Snitker. K. C. Jones.

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...


Cutting Through the Networks: An Assessment of the Circulation of Singular Artifacts in Prehistoric Iberia (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Rodriguez-Rellan. Ramón Fábregas Valcarce.

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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Torquato.

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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Shennan.

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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Vernon. Peter Yaworsky. Brian Codding.

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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Reynolds. Thomas Palazzolo. Ashley Lemke. John O'Shea. Sarah Saad.

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)
DOCUMENT Citation Only René Ohlrau. Aleksandr Diachenko.

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...


Density Dependent Models Rely on Accurate Population Estimates (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Contreras. Brian Codding.

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists increasingly leverage ideal distribution models to analyze settlement and demographic patterning in the past. Successful application requires adequate, spatially explicit proxies of both environmental suitability and past population. This paper focuses on the latter, recognizing that a growing number of studies rely on summaries of...


Did the Neolithic Revolution Revolutionize the European Landscape? An Analysis of the Relationship between Climate, Vegetation, and the Arrival of Agro-pastoral Subsistence (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Grant Snitker. Sean Bergin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long recognized the spread and adoption of agro-pastoral subsistence in Europe as a transformative economic and social process. While many studies have tied site-specific changes in vegetation communities to the arrival of the Neolithic, very few attempts have been made at synthesizing these data to examine the Neolithic revolution in...


Digital and Computational Methodologies for Masonry Typologies: A Quantitative Approach to Structure Classification in the Colca Valley, Peru (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Turley. Steven Wernke.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th 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 16th century Spanish invasion of the Andes caused unprecedented societal upheaval and, in the 1580s, the physical upheaval of people as the Toledan reducción system resettled...


The Dreaded Pox: Agent-Based Simulation of the 1870 Smallpox Epidemic in Tucson, Arizona (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Pye.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In October of 1869 a smallpox outbreak developed in Tucson, Arizona, which lasted until late April of 1870. Historical documents do not agree on the number of deaths resulting from the epidemic, and no concrete information is given about the extent of the illness spread through the Tucson community or the surrounding region. Bioarchaeological evidence of...


Dynamic Coastlines: Modeling the Impacts of the Intertidal Zone Transformation for Puerto Rico during the Mid- to Late Holocene (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Rodríguez-Delgado.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As Caribbean research engages in the study of past human-environmental relations, few efforts have focused on the reconstruction of the dynamic intertidal zone and its impacts on past food security and livelihood. Interdisciplinary approaches can address this gap as these paleogeographic and paleoclimatic reconstructions contribute an understanding of coastal...


Dynamic Coasts and Landscapes of Resilience: Archaeological and Environmental Hotspot Modelling on the Swahili Coast (6th – 19th century CE) (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Ioana Dumitru. Wolfgang Alders.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With over forty percent of the global population residing within 100 kilometers of a coastline, coastal regions stand at the forefront of the climate breakdown. This paper adopts a diachronic approach to investigate how Swahili coastal communities, who inhabited the northern Tanzanian coasts from the late 6th to the 19th centuries CE, adapted to a spectrum...