Digital Archaeology: GIS (Other Keyword)

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman Horn. Justin Tran. Anabel Ford.

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. The ancient Maya city El Pilar was founded in an ecotonal location, where the karstic ridgelands of the greater Petén grade into the alluvial Belize River Valley and coastal plain. Established early in the Middle Preclassic (ca. 1000 BCE), El Pilar grew into a major center that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Tran. Anabel Ford. Sherman Horn III.

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. Traditional ecological knowledge from living Maya farmers informs us of a storied heritage of agricultural production within the tropical Maya lowlands that traces its lineage to the development and height of ancient Maya civilization. In studying the Maya milpa-cycle, a 20-year...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alaina Wibberly.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The settler colonial history of the Mojave Desert may be defined less by its expansion and more by its various failures and withdrawals. Drawing on a dataset of historic refuse sites that spans two centuries and three million acres, this paper uses spatial modeling to map the landscape’s trajectory toward waste-land. The trash dumps and mining ruins that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Hutson. Travis Stanton. Audrey Rosen. José Francisco Osorio León. Francisco Pérez Ruíz.

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. Among the Classic and Postclassic period Maya, cacao beans were one of the most common forms of currency. Ancient Maya art depicts this money, which grows on trees, as tribute in courtly scenes most often populated by men. Yet contact period ethnohistoric documents consistently attribute ownership of trees to women. While contemporary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Polk. Jeremy Wilson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since early archaeological investigations in the Ohio River Valley, scholars have speculated on the relationship between late pre-contact Fort Ancient villages and earlier Woodland mounds and earthworks. However, few have empirically addressed the association between these sites and their placement on a persistent landscape. We seek to determine the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dita Auzina.

This is an abstract from the "The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Large stone and earth mounds of Cascal de Flor de Pino in the Caribbean of Nicaragua, which were built between 4 BC and AD 9, are unique in the region and have been suggested as a sign of social stratification and inequality. Indeed, reaching more than 30 m in diameter and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Hansen. Edgar Suyuc. Carlos Morales. Beatriz Balcarcel. Stanley Guenter.

Archaeological investigations in 51 ancient sites within the geographical confines of the Mirador Basin of northern Guatemala have identified an extraordinary emphasis on monumentality in art and architecture dating well into the Middle and Late Preclassic periods of Maya occupation. The structure and format of this phenomenon is replicated in early complex societies in other parts of the world, and suggests a consistent human behavior of predictable characteristics. The analyses and forms of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Bacon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will discuss the benefits of using different combinations of rasters for large scale survey and the functional usage of viewing problematic mounds in the point cloud to weed away the false positives. Maya sites around Mesoamerica have and will be scanned with LiDAR. Since the turn of the century, technology has improved and now the data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Birge.

When the Inkas encountered them, the Carangas ethnic group in western Bolivia were highly mobile through lifestyles that relied on camelid pastoralism, caravanning, and ritual movement. Examples of Inka sites are known in the region, but it is not fully understood how they impacted movement through the Sajama lines--a network of ritual pathways that stretches over 16,000 kilometers. This poster compares new data from 2017 to previous work in the Sajama region to examine how movement along the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nick Belluzzo.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Situated at the transition between windward and leeward sides of the island of Hawai‘i, Manukā is a tapestry of environmental and sociopolitical gradients perpetually reconfigured by the lava flows from Mauna Loa. As a geographically liminal region, place-names describe it as where "the trade winds of Ka‘ū give way to the gentle breezes of Kona." The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karolina Werens. Rick Schulting. John Pouncett. Andrzej Weber. Christophe Snoeck.

This is an abstract from the "Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Strontium (87Sr/86Sr) and oxygen (δ18O) isotopic variability in the environment is commonly used in archaeology to study provenance and mobility in the past. The interpretation of 87Sr/86Sr and δ18O isotopic values in humans, typically measured in dental enamel, relies on a comparison...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jack Berner. Denis Sharapov. Andrei Logvin. Irina Shevnina.

This is an abstract from the "Steppe by Steppe: Advances in the Archaeology of Eastern Eurasia" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Bronze Age (2100–1400 BCE) of the Ural-Tobol interfluve saw the emergence and decline of proto-urban fortified settlements occupied by pastoralists and metallurgists. These sites have been interpreted as centers for military defense, ritual-political nodes, strategic centers to protect natural resources or avoid...

DOCUMENT Citation Only B Charles. Shannon Freire.

This is an abstract from the "There and Back Again: Celebrating the Career and Ongoing Contributions of Patricia B. Richards" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout her career, Patricia Richards conveyed experience and knowledge through storytelling. Impassioned and insightful, these stories often reveal episodes forgotten by written history. As one example, the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery (MCPFC) represents thousands of stories,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only F. Kirk Halford.

This is an abstract from the "Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Though making great strides over the past 50 years, Section 106, the primary driver of cultural resource management (CRM), is still often boxed in by rote inventory and derivative interpretation and implementation. This paper will discuss a national initiative by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Albert Garcia-Piquer. Colin Grier.

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. Reconstructing past seafaring presents major challenges. Beyond the archaeological invisibility of watercraft, a key issue is that theoretical models and archaeological predictions concerning aquatic movement are less developed than for terrestrial cases. We apply an explorative and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Whittington. Soren Frykholm.

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse II, Current Research in Oaxaca Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intermediate levels of social organization—above the household, but below the entire settlement, city, or polity—are notoriously difficult to pinpoint in archaeological contexts, but they nevertheless represent a crucial frontier for building new archaeological theory to understand daily social life in the past. Ethnographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Soto Rodriguez.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Applications of Network Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper seeks to present the results of network analysis for the case of the chiefdom communities that inhabited the northwestern slope of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta from AD 400 to 1600 in the El Congo microbasin. Through the use of statistical algorithms in R language and databases in geographic information systems, this paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karolina Werens. John Pouncett. Christophe Snoeck. Rick Schulting. Andrzej Weber.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A new bioavailable strontium isotope (87Sr/86Sr) baseline was created for the Baikal region, covering c. 1.5 million square kilometres. With an ongoing, extensive archaeological investigation of c. 200 prehistoric cemetery sites in this vast area, there is a need for a reliable isotopic model of environmental strontium variation to contextualise human and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camille Weinberg. Jo Osborn. Rachael Penfil. Kelita Pérez Cubas.

Located at the mouth of the Quebrada Topará on the Peruvian South Coast, Jahuay is a multicomponent site key to understanding the rise and spread of the Topará cultural tradition—and the Paracas decline—during the Early Horizon. Limited systematic archaeological work in the mid-20th century defined Jahuay as the type-site for Topará ceramics, and also reported the existence of tombs on the site’s upper terraces that were initially dated to the Late Horizon (AD 1450-1532). However, 2017...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Quinn.

There is a recursive relationship between socio-economic institutions and the environment. Decisions about where to place settlements in a landscape were informed by existing economic institutions, but placement of sites in turn effected how social and economic institutions were organized. In this paper, I present a new GIS-based method for quantifying socio-economic organization and change in prehistoric societies. Catchment analyses, as employed in this study, define the availability of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kylie Gambrill. Andrew Womack.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock imagery can be found across the globe, but research on this topic is still widely segmented by present political boundaries. In this study we transcend boundaries at the state level in the southeastern United States to better recognize and analyze patterns of rock imagery types and their environmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Downey.

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and remotely-sensed data are now used ubiquitously in archaeology. While these tools offer incredible possibilities for landscape archaeology and can be extremely cost-effective compared to traditional survey methods, they are nevertheless costs that must be borne by research budgets and home institutions. Data acquisition can easily reach thousands of dollars, and industry-leading GIS software platforms require expensive annual licenses. But all hope is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Schaefer. Stephen Alvarez. Alan Cressler. Jan Simek.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, rock art researchers have adopted a variety of automated methods that classify rock art images from high-resolution photographs and 3D models. These methods not only aid in the documentation of rock art, but can also assist with interpreting complex panels with multiple types of images...