Modeling (Other Keyword)
1-25 (34 Records)
At the Conservation Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University, recent projects have all implemented some form of 3D modeling of artifacts as part of the documentation process for either before treatment, after treatment, or both. The logistics of the implementation of 3D modeling as a standard documentation technique for every artifact in a collection can be daunting, especially when dealing with untreated waterlogged artifacts that must remain wet before conservation. This paper discusses...
5500 years of changing crop niches on the Tibetan Plateau (2016)
The timing and mechanics of the spread of agriculture to the Tibetan Plateau—one of the most challenging environmental contexts on Earth—is a focus of recent work and debate. In research on the spread of agriculture, researchers have sought evidence for the earliest, furthest or highest occurrences of diagnostic elements. However, the case of the Tibetan Plateau illustrates a key flaw in current work: archaeologists have often uncritically interpreted the presence of plant domesticates at...
Alkali Ridge Cultural Resource Survey and Vandalism Study, Southeast Utah (1985)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Archaeological Survey of Four Seismic Lines Near Aneth and McCracken Mesa, San Juan County, Utah (1981)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Be Polite, Be Professional, But Have A Plan To Not Kill Every Shipwreck You Meet: Fusing Traditional Methods, and Cutting-Edge Geospatial Modeling to Adaptively Manage a Maritime Cultural Landscape Under Siege. (2018)
In the battle to preserve vulnerable historic maritime resources, recovery efforts after the unprecedented devastation of Superstorm Sandy highlighted a desperate need to locate, identify, and catalog the submerged resources of New Jersey. Today, resiliency undertakings, new development projects, plans to address rising sea levels and severe storms, have all encountered maritime archaeological resources. With over 1,600 known historic shipwrecks crowding only 150 miles of Atlantic coastline, and...
Can you Model my Valley? Particular People, Places and Times in Archaeological Simulation (2017)
Every archaeological modeler, whether generalist or particularist, eventually gets asked whether "their model" can help reconstruct a particular past. Could a general archaeological simulation engine be built that can be customized to answer specific questions about specific archaeological contexts, or is simulation a tool that must remain largely general and heuristic? I will argue both that it is useful to work toward a general archaeological simulation engine, and that such an engine could...
A Case for Photogrammetry in Deepwater Archaeological Site Investigations (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Advances in software combined with modern high-end computing have made the ability to create highly accurate maps and models of deepwater shipwrecks a reality. The capacity to create scaled and measurable models restore one of the fundamental tenants of mapping sites in terrestrial archaeology, but in an environment that was previously restricted by cost, time, access, and accuracy....
A Comparison Of Photogrammetric Software For Three-Dimensional Modeling Of Maritime Archaeological Objects (2018)
Multi-photograph digital photogrammetry, a powerful tool for archaeologists, is quickly gaining traction for site and object recording and reproduction. As technology advances, new software packages are being developed, but are all packages the same? Does one software package have any advantages over another? Is one software package more useful in certain situations than another? These questions will be explored by recording the ventilation engines recovered from the wreck of the USS Monitor,...
Complex but Equal: Developing an Archaeological Inequality Index to Investigate Social Inequality at the Bronze Age III site of Numayra, Jordan (2016)
The origins, evolution, and variation of inequality comprise a central overarching theme within anthropological archaeology. Various ideas, including hierarchy and heterarchy and their material correlates, have been proffered to explain the origins and impact of inequality on past social, economic, and political organization. Within Economics and Development Studies, various indices and measures, e.g., Gini coefficient, Theil Index, HDI and GDP, and the Consumption Approach have been offered as...
Computing Material Culture: The utility of mobile photogrammetric techniques in capturing structures (2016)
Photogrammetric techniques have been around for many years but have not been widely implemented because of the requirements of known camera positions and expertise in registering photographs, as well as the difficulty involved with going from data points to actual models. This paper addresses concerns with accuracy, efficiency and overall utility of using more mobile photogrammetric techniques and related software which we began using in 2013. In addition, some of the benefits of photogrammetry...
Culture and Disease: Modeling the Spread of Tuberculosis in Wyoming (2018)
Until recently, the development and spread of tuberculosis in humans has been associated with the advent of Old World animal domestication and agriculture. However, recent evidence for the presence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis raises the possibility of a Pleistocene era dispersal. Poor bone preservation and small populations make finding Pleistocene-era bioarchaeological evidence of the disease difficult. Coupled with this, epidemiological studies suggest that population numbers were too low...
Downscaling in Archaeology: From digital forest to probable trees (2017)
Integrating archaeological and paleoenvironmental data about the past is a longstanding archaeological goal. It is often central to basic archaeological interpretation, fundamental to addressing questions of human-environment interaction, and vital to realizing archaeology’s potential contributions to studies of vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability in the face of climate change. However, such integration faces challenges of scale, resolution, and mechanism. Increasingly abundant digital...
Effective Population Size and the Effects of Demography on Cultural Diversity and Technological Complexity (2017)
The "demographic hypothesis" provides a recent example of how models can play an important role in driving new and interesting archaeological research. Influential models by Shennan and Henrich inspired the notion that, holding all else constant, members of larger populations ought to display more diverse and more complex toolkits than those in smaller populations. Empirical tests of this idea against the material culture of recent small-scale societies have yielded mixed results, raising valid...
Environmental Factors Affecting Death Valley National Park’s Historical Archeological Sites. (2016)
Connecting specific site ecology, adaptation strategies, and location selection preferences for residential and mining resources at Death Valley National Park, the objectives of this study, are key tools that archeologists bring to the situation of climate change. We use an ecological niche modeling approach that identifies bias as well as preference for site selection. Specifically, the models output predict suitability and probability of where specific site types are situated across the...
Finite Element Modelling of the Wreck of USS Arizona (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Hard Science on Hard Steel: Scientific Studies of the USS Arizona" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Finite element modeling (FEM) is a method for predicting the stresses in a body under load. We are building a model of USS Arizona to use as a conservation tool - a virtual way of predicting future degradation and trying out conservation schemes. Results will be shown of initial modeling efforts and how we...
Human Use of the Sand Hills (Central Plains, North America) during the Peri-Medieval Warm Period: Expectations and Preliminary Observations (2016)
The Sand Hills of northcentral Nebraska (Central Plains, North America) were transgressively devegetated and revegetated during the Medieval Warm Period yet also may have hosted several oases. We rely on Binford’s hunter-gatherer frames of reference to model a series of expectations for human occupation here in terms of innovation, resource management systems organization, social network scale and character, and place development as the Medieval Warm Period waxed and waned. Extant archaeological...
In Defense of Data: Realigning Archaeological Modeling Theory with Modern Statistical Learning Approaches (2016)
The acceptance of statistical modeling as common practice in archaeological studies is highly varied across applications and methodological focus. As a field, we lack a unified body of model building theory, best practices, and examples that demonstrate the successes and failures of various techniques applied specifically to archaeological data. The literature on archaeological predictive modeling (APM) provides a notable example in the form of the "Inductive" vs. "Deductive" debate. This false...
The Inclusion of Ethnographic Data And Controlling for Political Bias Leads to Robust Modeling in Archaeology (2016)
There have been multiple advances in recent approaches to modeling within archaeology. The power of advanced computational techniques including agent-based modeling, Bayesian approaches, etc., have enabled archaeologists to hypothesize and describe complex multi-scalar processes affecting past societies, while paying heed to multiplicity of variable factors. However, while anthropological archaeologists reject models within economics and political science as "data-poor," recent archaeological...
Late Classic to Terminal Classic Maya Transitions: Modeling from NW Belize (2016)
The Late Classic (AD 600-800) to Terminal Classic (AD 800-900) of NW Belize reveals a change in material culture, settlements, and social-political manifestations. Detailed here are some of the changes observed for the transition from the Late Classic to the Terminal Classic. Changes in material culture are described as are apparent choices in settlement locales between the two temporal phases. The interplay between material culture, settlements, and social-political organization are posited...
Mapping and 3D Modeling of Mayapán's Monumental Center (2017)
During our 2016 field season, we mapped and created 3D models of Mayapán's monumental center and several major architectural features. Located in the Northern Yucatán approximately 40km south of Modern Mérida, Mexico, Mayapán was the largest ancient Maya political capital of the Postclassic Period and was one of the most densely nucleated of all Maya cities. It was a key center of political, religious, and economic activity. Mayapán's monumental zone is relatively small, but contains a dense...
A Mid-19th Century Lighter from San Francisco Bay’s Yerba Buena Cove: Context, Documentation and Conservation (2015)
In 2013, WSA recovered a well-preserved Gold Rush Era lighter from the original shore of Yerba Buena Cove. This class of boat, used to load and unload ships where there is no adequate harbor, was used extensively in San Francisco prior to the completion of sufficient deep-water wharfs in the 1860s. This paper contextualizes the use of lighters in frontier San Francisco and presents new insights into the construction of the recovered lighter gained from the creation of a 1:12 scale model. The...
Mobility and cultural diversity in central-place foragers: Implications for the emergence of modern human behavior (2015)
Although anthropologists have long recognized the importance of mobility to hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies, it remains unclear how mobility affects cultural diversity in subdivided populations. A better understanding of how mobility affects both total diversity and regional differentiation in selectively neutral cultural traits may provide us with an additional line of evidence for explaining the appearance of archaeological indicators of modern human behavior. Here, I introduce a...
Modeling a rapid transition in subsistence regimes in highland western China (2015)
The highlands of western Sichuan (or Eastern Tibet) experienced a profound change in both settlement patterns and in subsistence regimes when a shift from a millet-based agriculture to wheat and barley based agro-pastoralism took place c. 2000 cal. BC. Using a model that predicts the changing possible distribution of crops across the area, we examine the role that changes in ancient climate could have played in the reversal of subsistence practices in this area. SAA 2015 abstracts made...
No strength in numbers after all? Demographic explanations of cumulative culture re-examined (2015)
Cultural-evolutionary models of scientific and technological change enjoy growing popularity. This family of mathematical and agent-based models purportedly explains how cultural change results from a ‘demographic’ effect: complex traits accumulate in large groups, and disappear in smaller groups. We use agent-based modelling to reveal hidden contingencies in these findings. We show that the demographic effect is sensitive to assumptions regarding social learning mechanisms and skill...
Nunataks and Valley Glaciers: Over the Mountains and Through the Ice (2016)
The first peopling of the Americas is characterized by either a coastal route or an ice free corridor during the late Wisconsin glaciation, when continental ice still covered the north half of the continent. While the pendulum has swung somewhat towards the coastal route, no smoking gun exists that will deliver a champion in this controversy. With this paper we would like to present a third option – the “Icy Corridor.” We argue that a corridor is an unnecessary feature for Clovis predecessors...