Digital Archaeology: GIS (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hali Thurber. Justin Uehlein.

GIS has become a powerful tool for visualizing cultural activity over time and space. We have found that it is invaluable in the archaeological study of movement and transient labor. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate how the use of geospatial technology in conjunction with the material record can offer a glimpse into the daily movements of transient laborers along Mid-Atlantic railway networks and industrial centers in the late 19th century through the Great Depression. Specifically, we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Craig Stevens.

Josiah Henson was an escaped enslaved individual and eventual Underground Railroad conductor, yet his life story has been historically overshadowed by the fictional character he inspired in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s internationally renowned novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC) and Montgomery Parks of southern Maryland utilizes archaeological research as one of many techniques to bring to life the narrative of Josiah Henson the individual,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Birge.

This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Movement and the rhythm of life, from procuring food to trade and ritual, are major structuring forces of human lives. However, examining these practices archaeologically can prove difficult due to the minimal and/or short lived evidence of routes. The Sajama landscape of the Carangas provides an example of these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynn Kim.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonial encounters with the Inka Empire led to social changes reflected in the landscape. A hallmark of Inka landscapes were their roads. I explore if the road network in the Camata-Carijana Valley materialized broader forms of state or local control through its distribution and construction. In particular, I investigate how the design of road system...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Auld-Thomas. Marcello Canuto.

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. Researchers assess sustainability using spatial bounds, be they for a single community or the entire planet. But the specific boundaries we use matter greatly, because practices (and populations) that are unsustainable at one scale may be sustainable at another depending on a host of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Chase.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2009 and 2013, LiDAR data collected for Caracol, Belize revealed the anthropogenic landscape of this Maya city. These data have advanced our understanding of water management, agriculture, markets, urbanism, and inequality at Caracol. Now with the analytical unit of the district – an urban administrative boundary of urban service provisioning within a city...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Ballance.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. “El Lazarillo de Ciegos Caminantes” (1775) describes the colonial highway from Buenos Aires to Lima. Authored by a Spanish official, Alonso Carrió de la Vandera, the document records a uniquely elite experience of travel. The author describes a journey taken from Buenos Aires to Lima structured by the posta, a colonial system of lodging and transport...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Soares. Rui Mataloto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bronze Age settlements in the Evora district of Portugal are typically located in rocky terrain with an apparent preference for locations in the highlands. During the Iron Age we see a shift of this settlement pattern, as highland sites are abandoned and new settlements appear at lower altitudes. Was the initial selection of highland sites influenced by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristy Primeau.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent development in the field of landscape archaeoacoustics has resulted in improved GIS-based soundshed modeling solutions, however, it has also led to the identification of several limitations of these tools. Foremost among these limitations is the lack of reliable modeling capability to explore the effects of vegetation attenuation or variable ground...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nawa Sugiyama. Saburo Sugiyama. Adrian Chase. Tanya Catignani. Taylor Gibson.

In the 1970s, systematic and expansive survey techniques enabled Million to create the first map of Teotihuacan, establishing the limits and density of the city. In this presentation we introduce a newly developed 2.5 dimensional map based on a LiDAR landscape model overlaid with a high-precision architectural map of the city drawn in AutoCAD covering 174 km2 area that extends the Million map by 131 km2. LiDAR technologies have greatly aided archaeological research in many landscapes with high...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Chatelain.

Excavations at minor centers provide us not only with a wealth of information about those sites, but they can also illuminate sociopolitical shifts over time within the broader region. The minor center of La Cariba, located four kilometers southwest of La Corona, has been investigated since 2009. A broad dataset including architectural, epigraphic, osteological, and artifactual evidence has provided a detailed narrative of political and demographic changes over a millennium at La Cariba. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Burham.

Recent investigations of reservoirs associated with minor temple groups at Ceibal, Guatemala shed light on the role of water management in intermediate-level sociopolitical organization in ancient Maya society. Over the course of the Late and Terminal Preclassic periods (ca. 350BC-AD200), as Ceibal grew into an urban center, minor temples were built at regular intervals around the site core. These temples were the centers of local communities that were integrated primarily through ritual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phacharaphorn Phanomvan.

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. How were cities distributed in Mainland Southeast Asia in the past? What were the population estimates and patterns in the cities? Answering these questions leads to an understanding of long-term urbanization patterns, and the historical legacies associated with the geographical effects on development. However, to date, there is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Frachetti.

New research in the field of aDNA has re-invigorated debates about migrations across Eurasia in prehistory. Emerging data in this field demands that we interrogate how mobility and migration from an ecological and demographic perspective, since these factors influence our interpretation of the still emerging genetic data. In this paper I present the archaeological conditions of the Eurasian steppe ca. 3000-2000 BCE applied to a spatial model with the goal of generating a more complex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Jacobson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Least cost pathway research focuses on creating a baseline model of human movement constructed on defined variables. The stark landscape of the Bighorn mountains, from a Plains or Basin perspective, can be incredibly steep and difficult to navigate, without high cost or risk. The study uses GIS to identify least cost pathways as possible routes of migration...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliette Mitchell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The visible commemoration of individuals in early medieval Scotland marks a big change in burial practice, with the shift to inhumation under burial mounds. The barrows, demonstrations of identity and power, are not just located in the landscape but interwoven and embedded within it. This poster presents recent research to recreate and understand the setting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fiona Haverland. Scott Van Keuren.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades of provenance studies in the American Southwest have greatly clarified ceramic exchange networks. However, very little investigation has been done on the actual paths or processes used to move pottery within these networks. What pathways were used to transport pottery? What are the energetics of traveling those pathways? And how were ceramics...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mackenzie Cory. Edward W. Herrmann.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we expand upon our analysis of all recorded early Paleoindian sites in Indiana by incorporating spatial data from middle and late Paleoindian sites. Our analysis of both site locations and least cost paths between tool stone resources and sites with identified raw material types indicates that temporal differences exist for where Paleoindians...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Egan.

The Tilarán -Arenal region of Costa Rica is one of the most volcanically active regions in the world. Despite the inherent hazard, people have occupied this region since the Paleo-Indian period (7000 B.C.). Numerous studies have explored volcanic eruptions as forcing mechanism that lead to culture; however, starting with the advent of sedentary villages during the Tronodora phase (2000-500 B.C.) until the arrival of Spanish in the 16th century, people maintained relatively small-scale,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marieka Brouwer Burg.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and the History of Human-Environment Interaction in the Lower Belize River Watershed" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While the Late Archaic (3400–900 BCE) has received comparably less research attention than the subsequent Maya period, there has been a surge of interest in this important period in the past two decades. In Belize, the majority of Late Archaic or Preceramic finds occur on the surface and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Anklam. Dan Wendt.

Since 2009 the Knife Lake siltstone quarries in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Minnesota U.S. quarry district have been the focus of archaeological and geoarchaeological research. A recent survey conducted in 2014 and 2015 identified several relic beach features at varying elevations above the current water line of Knife Lake. GIS was used to model and predict these proglacial lake shoreline features to better understand the procurement patterns of Knife Lake siltstone, a prominent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Aiuvalasit. Ian Jorgeson.

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. We present a new approach for identifying archaeological proxies for community vulnerabilities to climate change: least cost analyses of water acquisition costs from archaeological sites to water. By automating the least cost analysis through a custom Python script in ArcGIS Pro, we modeled the 1-way cost for water acquisition...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Garrett Silliman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The application of geographic information systems (GIS) technologies to archaeological investigations continues to provide new perspectives on historical events. Applied to battlefield archaeology, GIS analysis offers an efficient means of predicting potential artifact distribution across a conflict landscape. The approach proposed in this paper allows a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Howland.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper analyzes the impact of projected sea-level rise as a result of anthropogenic climate change on coastal archaeological sites in the state of Georgia. Coastal sites and environments are at increasing risk of erosion, inundation, and submersion due to projected sea level rise of 0.25-0.30 meters by 2050 and up to 2.1 meters by 2100, along with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stone Shi. Megan Kresse. Thomas Moran. Anabel Ford. Robert Carr.

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. Much debate has surrounded population and land-use strategies of the Maya. Residential settlements are accepted as a proxy for population and areas without architecture would be available for subsistence. We examine the case of Tikal, where the existing map visually describes...