Digital Archaeology: GIS (Other Keyword)
376-400 (521 Records)
Where people choose to settle can be thought of in part as a behavioral response to the ecological constraints placed on a society’s ability to meet its needs through interacting with its environment. While humans are indeed not always completely rational actors, their endeavors require either basic raw materials or environmental conditions that, when absent, either force them to seek out other regions for exploitation or adapt to new conditions. Because of this, archaeologists have long been...
Refining Airborne Laser Scanning Data to See Through Mayapán's Dense Vegetation (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I present a workflow for optimizing the classification of airborne laser scanning point data and the selection of appropriate surface visualization techniques to improve the identification of archaeological and environmental features at the Postclassic city of Mayapán. The initial 2013 digital elevation model enabled the identification of thousands of...
Refining Ecological Contexts of Animal Herding: Implications for Culture Process (2024)
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. Previous research that derived expectations from hunter-gatherer macroecology demonstrates that the combination of effective temperature zones and setting near coastlines or very large interior lakes display distinct patterns of resource intensification. These patterns allow researchers to predict the...
Regional Defensive Strategies and Chronic Warfare in the Southern Nasca Region (2018)
Warfare was a prevalent phenomenon throughout the Andes during the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–1450; henceforth LIP). A salient research topic within broader investigations of conflict is how populations cope with chronic warfare. This presentation utilizes geostatistical analyses of architectural and topographical features to reconstruct defensive coping mechanisms among LIP groups living in 12 fortified settlements in the southern Nasca highlands of Peru. Analytical results reveal a...
A Relationship between Seasonal Flooding and Raised Agricultural Fields in the Llanos de Mojos, Bolivia (2018)
The Llanos de Mojos, Bolivia, a seasonally flooded savanna region in the western Amazon lowlands, has several types of artificial landscape modifications that point to a significant pre-Columbian occupation with some approximately as old as 500BCE. These earthworks include 40-50,000 raised fields which were used as a regional-wide agricultural technique to grow a variety of crops. This paper focuses on the relationship of these fields to their hydrological environment. Using GIS in conjunction...
Remembering ichaskhah (Camp Creek): Low-Impact Methodologies for Documenting an Early Twentieth-Century Wichita Camp and Dance Ground in Oklahoma (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes have a long history of occupation in Oklahoma. This includes evidence of both pre- and postcontact habitations along major and minor waterways near Anadarko, Oklahoma. Here Wichita peoples camped, built grass houses and arbors, and held social...
Remote Sensing and Ground Truthing: Re-Visiting the Middle Khabur, Northeastern Syria (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between 1986 and 1994, the Yale University Khabur Basin Survey Project (KBP) carried out archaeological surveys of the middle Khabur region of northeastern Syria and recovered ceramic and lithic artifacts from 257 sites dating from the Palaeolithic to the Ottoman period. Following these ground investigations, in 1998, Nicholas Kouchoukos used Landsat...
Results of Survey and Analysis of Manteño Archaeological Sites with Stone Structures in the Upper Río Blanco River Valley, Manabí, Ecuador (2018)
This paper will present the results of a three-year effort to survey and document Manteño archaeological sites with stone structures within the limits of the Upper Río Blanco River Valley in Southern Manabí. The region is home to 40 known Manteño sites with more than 100 stone structures across the river valleys of La Encantada, Las Tusas and La Mocora that carve the foothills of the Bola de Oro mountain. The Florida Atlantic University Archaeological Fieldschool in Ecuador, directed by...
A Review of the Antiquity and Distribution of Intertidal Fishing Technology in Southeast Alaska and Future Research Inquiry (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Important questions related to the innovation of intertidal fishing on the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America remain, including when and where different versions of this technology were first used. This poster provides a brief overview of this phenomenon in Southeast Alaska using GIS. Additionally, we offer suggestions for future research using...
Revisiting the Mesoamerican Materials from Paquimé (2019)
This is an abstract from the "25 Years in the Casas Grandes Region: Celebrating Mexico–U.S. Collaboration in the Gran Chichimeca" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning with the first investigations in Paquimé, one of the most important issues that archaeologists have identified was the site’s apparently intimate relationship with Mesoamerica. This idea is supported by relatively abundant copper objects, as well as ceramic remains from southern...
The Rhode Island Archaeological and Historical Geographic Information System (GIS) Development Project (2018)
In 2017 the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission teamed up with the University of Rhode Island’s Applied History Laboratory to develop a Geographic Information System (GIS) incorporating the state’s complex assortment of archaeological and historical sites. With support from the National Park Service, their objective is to collect and share the stories of Rhode Island by creating a fully operational and sustainable geospatial database of known archaeological sites and...
Rhythms of Settlement Aggregation and Disintegration in Iron Age Bavaria (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In many parts of Temperate Europe, the first aggregated and fortified urban settlements developed in the Early Iron Age. However, many of these settlements disappeared after a few generations. After a period of decentralization lasting at least two centuries, another episode of settlement aggregation took place in...
Ritual and Political Landscapes of the Preclassic Maya: A View from the Cival Region (2018)
The link between Lowland Maya ritual and power relations during the Preclassic period has been so far approached primarily through iconographic, burial and artifact data at the local scale. Very little evidence exists linking notions of political authority, ritual practices and landscapes at the regional level. Recent survey and excavation data from the Cival region of Northeastern Peten, reveals a vast and complex settlement pattern. The Preclassic Maya city of Cival was surrounded by a network...
Ritual Landscapes of the Lower Mississippi Valley: The Marksville Archaeological Project (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) has a long history of monumentality, with early examples of monumental earthworks confidently dated to the Middle Archaic (6000 – 3000 BC) and Late Archaic (3000 – 1000 BC) periods, and other mounds dating to Woodland (after 1000 BC) and Mississippi (after AD 1200) periods. The Middle Woodland-period Marksville mound site...
Riverside 2: Urban Archaeology, Landscape Reconstruction, and Public Engagement (2018)
The Riverside 2 site, situated along the original shoreline of the island of Manhattan, presents a unique opportunity for landscape reconstruction within an urban archaeological context. Drawing upon geoarchaeological borings, excavation units, and historical sources, we created a 3D GIS model of the site highlighting its role in the development and transformation of the emerging neighborhood of the Upper West Side in the 19th century. The results of these research efforts have recently been put...
Rock Art and the Creation of Landscape at Callacpuma, Peru (2018)
Numerous rock art panels dot the landscape of the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-AD 1450) site of Callacpuma in the Cajamarca Basin of northern Peru. The panels are comprised of many distinct motifs and types including a variety of camelids, anthropomorphs, geometric patterns and other zoomorphs. Although the iconographic information held within these motifs is certainly important, this project attempts to move beyond the iconographic significance of individual motifs or panels and examine...
Rock Art Distribution in the Windwards in the Caribbean: A GIS Locational Perspective (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock art locations in the Caribbean are well known and include caves, waterways, coasts, inland rock formations, and ceremonial enclosures. Mythological (caves as centers of origin and fertility) and practical considerations (guardians of fresh water sources) have been offered as general explanations for...
The Role of Geomorphology and GIS in the Identification of Paleoindian Archaeological Sites at Yellowstone Lake, Wyoming, U.S.A. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We discuss the role of geomorphology in identifying early Paleoindian archaeological sites at North America’s highest-elevation natural lake, Yellowstone Lake, Wyoming. Prior research proposed geomorphological models for the ages of Yellowstone Lake paleoshorelines that mark former lake levels after Late Pleistocene glacial retreat. Based on results of 10...
Rooms, Houses, and Neighborhoods: Drone-mapping and GIS Analyses of the Household Architecture at Cerro la Virgen, Moche Valley, Peru (AD 1100–1470) (2018)
Here we explore the spatial patterning of the Small Irregular Agglutinated Residences (SIAR) at the Chimú town of Cerro la Virgen (1100–1470 AD) in the Moche Valley, Peru. Few examples of "Andean Households" are as enigmatic and iconic as SIAR, which were closely associated with the florescence of the Chimú Empire. Large barrios consisting of SIAR architecture are found at the Chan Chan (the Chimu capital) and at all Chimu provincial centers throughout the empire. Cerro la Virgen once lay in...
Roots and Routes of Rock Art: A Kernel Density Analysis of Newly Recorded Rock Art Sites to Understand Human Mobility in the North East Kimberley, Australia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Art of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A large corpus of 1034 rock art sites in Australia's NE Kimberley has recently been recorded within the Kimberley Visions Australian Research Council Linkage Project. Rock art analysis in the Kimberley has often focused on distinctive iconographic signatures to structure images in rigid sequences. This approach is inadequate for the understanding of the complex...
Satellite Imagery and Esri’s ArcGIS Pro’s Georeferencing Tools Confirm Arkansas City, Kansas Is the Locale of Etzanoa, a Historic Site Visited by Spanish Explorer, Juan Oñate, in 1601 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using Esri’s ArcGIS Pro’s georeferencing tools to rubber-sheet a historic native map to satellite imagery confirms Dr. Donald J. Blakeslee’s findings (2018) regarding a site located near the mouth of the Walnut River, in Arkansas City, Kansas. The site is likely the native town, Etzanoa, a settlement of the Ancestral Wichita and Affiliated Tribes visited by...
Searching for Submerged Salmon Streams (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beringia is central (both physically and theoretically) to most out-of-Asia theories for how humans first came to the Americas. Understanding the chronology of the peopling of the Americas is complicated by the fact that roughly two million km2 of Beringia (an area larger than the modern US state of Alaska) was submerged over the course of the late...
Searching Oregon’s Outer Continental Shelf for Submerged First Americans Sites: Theory, Methods, and Recent Discoveries (2018)
If the First Americans initially migrated into the New World from northeastern Asia along a coastal route, we should expect to find the earliest evidence of human occupation in the Americas in submerged sites along the northeastern Pacific Rim. Late Pleistocene-aged human coastal migrants would undoubtedly exploit high ecological productivity zones of ancient estuaries and bays that once existed along paleocoastal landscapes. A systematic approach to the discovery of First Americans coastal...
Seasonal Visibility and the Panoptic Plantation: Exploring the Use of “Fertile” Landscapes and 3D GIS Visualization Technologies on Plantationscapes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Landscape approaches utilizing line-of-sight profiles and viewsheds to compute intervisibility are far from new techniques in archaeological research. Various well-known works have described the methods and theory used to map visibility on plantationscapes. However, due to a lack of technological capabilities, most have been forced to utilize incomplete...
Seeing like a Neural Network? Possibilities and Predicaments of Automated Virtual Archaeological Prospection (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What might it mean to see like a neural network over vast areas of ancient landscapes? Rapid advances in computer vision—especially approaches using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)—have made automated archaeological site and feature detection from satellite and aerial imagery over very large areas an achievable prospect. Such automated...