Digital Archaeology: GIS (Other Keyword)
251-275 (422 Records)
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...
Modeling the Milpa-Cycle: A GIS-Based Approach to Envisioning Ancient Maya Land Use and Traditional Agricultural Practices (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. 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...
Modeling the Mojave: Old Data, New Futures, and the Semiotics of Empty Space (2021)
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...
The Monumentality of the Preclassic Maya of the Mirador Basin, Guatemala (2018)
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...
Movement, Inka Ceques and the Sajama Lines of Bolivia (2018)
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...
Moving within the ‘A‘ā: The Influence of Liminality in the Hinterlands of Manukā, Ka‘ū, Hawai‘i Island (2019)
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...
A Multi-isotope Approach to Hunter-Gatherer Mobility and Microregional Connectivity in Middle Holocene Cis-Baikal, Southern Siberia (2023)
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...
The National Cultural Resources Information Management System (NCRIMS): New Horizons for Cultural Resources Data Management and Analyses (2021)
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...
Navigating Paradigms: Site Location and Settlement Patterns in Watery Environments from the Pacific Northwest Coast and Southern Patagonia (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. 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...
New Evidence of Late Intermediate and Inca Occupation at Jahuay, Quebrada de Topará, Peru (2018)
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...
A New Method for Monitoring Socio-Economic Changes through Settlement Placement (2018)
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...
New Research into Environmental Contexts of Southeastern Rock Imageries (2023)
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...
No-Budget Archaeology: Landscape Archaeology Using Free Data and Software (2018)
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...
Object-Based Image Analysis for Classifying Precontact Native American Mud Glyphs by Production Technique (2023)
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...
Of Palisades and Postmolds (2018)
The fieldwork conducted in Tyler Bastian’s 1969-1970 salvage trench at Biggs Ford revealed a unique window into two Late Woodland villages, a Montgomery Complex and a Keyser Complex. The post mold patterns observed in the initial analysis of the trench may indicate the footprints of both complexes. Linear post mold arcs and a ring of pits may be consistent with other known Montgomery Complex sites, namely the Winslow site in Montgomery County. Additionally, post mold patterns in the extreme...
Ollas and Inequality: Reflections on Space, Ceramics, and Power Relationships at the Sanchez site. (2018)
Spanish exploitation of Indigenous people’s labor was a foundational component of the initial colonization of New Mexico. Pueblo Indians and enslaved Plains peoples worked on Spanish public infrastructure projects, built Spanish Missions, tended friar’s livestock, and helped with the daily operations of outlying estancias. At the Sanchez site, evidence of daily labors can be seen in broken manos and metates scattered around the site, the presence of the adobe structures that were built by Pueblo...
"The Other Half of the Sky": Competitive Anarchy in Contact-Era Palau (2018)
This paper explores the way in which contact-era Palauan society negotiated between hierarchy and heterarchy to ensure long-term sociopolitical stability, developing and deploying a theory of competitive anarchy. The evaluation critiques the frequent correlation of complexity with hierarchy and centrality and does so through a geostatistical analysis. This investigation begins with the development of a proposed model of Palauan sociopolitical structure, derived through ethnographic descriptions...
Over the Hills and Far Away: Evaluating Competing Models for Early Ceramic Period Mobility in the Southern Rocky Mountains (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition from the Late Archaic (1200 B.C. to A.D. 150) to the Early Ceramic (A.D. 150 – A.D. 1150) in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming is characterized by decreasing mobility, a trend reflected by the adoption of ceramic technology, limited stone architecture, and longer site occupation. Contrasted against this shift to longer occupations is...
P-Map: Digitizing the village of Pueblo Grande (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The prehistoric Hohokam village of Pueblo Grande, in the heart of Phoenix, was established as a City park and museum in 1929. The site includes one of the largest platform mounds in Arizona, a ballcourt (possibly two), thousands of features, and once contained a tower-like structure. Excavations have been conducted at Pueblo Grande since as early as 1901...
Paleoindians of Arkansas: From the Mountains to the Mississippi of the Interior Southeast (2018)
In the past two decades, advancing methodologies and the recovery of new cultural materials have expanded our knowledge of the earliest peopling of the Ozarks, Ouachita Mountains and Mississippi Valley of Arkansas. In the late 1990’s, GIS analyses in the Mississippi Valley of northeastern Arkansas highlighted the significant association of early cultures to the lithic resources of the landscape and subsequent collaboration with PIDBA in the past decade has put this state-level record in...
Paleolithic Occupations at Riparo Bombrini (Liguria, Italy): Understanding the Spatial Organization of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology of Liguria: Recent Research and Insights" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Riparo Bombrini (Liguria, Italy) offers a unique setting to compare the spatial organization of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens occupations in a single archaeological site. The disappearance of Neanderthals is one of the greatest debates in prehistory since the period of their decline corresponds to the...
Paths of Connection in the Great Dismal Swamp: Wetland Watercourses as Indigenous and Maroon Landscape Features (2018)
Speckled with mesic islands and peat hummocks, the soggy lowlands and standing water of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina (USA) were home to thousands of African and African American Maroons ca. 1608-1863 and were a significant feature of the landscape of Indigenous Americans for many centuries prior. The Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study and the Swampscapes project archaeologically investigate the landscape of resistance created by Maroons. The Dismal is far from a...
Patrones de movilidad como reflejo de la concepción del diseño urbano: Un caso del Centro Sur de Veracruz en el Clásico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En la actualidad, la visita a las zonas arqueológicas está determinada por un recorrido establecido por cuestiones de conservación y disfrute. Sin embargo, la movilidad dentro de las ciudades prehispánicas estuvo organizada por el diseño urbano, y su desarrollo a través del tiempo,...
Peaks Above, Plains Below: The Deeper Context of Settlement Patterning in Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Crete (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents an analysis of the long-term dynamics of settlement patterning on the Greek island of Crete, with a particular focus on the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. Alongside - or in the absence of - other forms of archaeological data, changes in settlement patterning have been central to debates around political and economic change on the...
People, Place, and Identity: Funerary Landscapes and the Development of the Early Medieval Kingdom of Northumbria (2018)
Early medieval Britain witnessed dramatic changes to the socio-cultural landscape due to the withdrawal of Roman authority, climatic change, and the arrival of migrants from the continent and from different regions of Britain. The analytical and scientific analysis of the burial record, from a landscape perspective, allows an investigation of key questions related to the scope and nature of this migration, the development of social identity, and how portions of Britain expanded from small...