Gis (Other Keyword)
251-275 (275 Records)
The central topic of this poster focus on the conversion of archaeological survey data to a GIS format for the identification of settlement patterns by communities that inhabited the Elephant river region, a tributary of the Limpopo River (southern Mozambique), from c. 300 to c. 20 thousand years ago. Specifically, we tried to identify and characterize the settlement dynamics of each cultural phase (MSA and LSA), in order to understand the choices related to the selection of site location in...
Using GIS for Public Outreach: Making Archaeological Data Accessible to Students, Stakeholders, and the General Public (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) has the potential to make archaeological data accessible to broad audiences, both as a medium for presenting information and as a platform for incorporating diverse perspectives into archaeological research. Drawing on our experiences working with students, stakeholders, and the general public as case studies, we examine the barriers to using...
Using GIS to Analyze the Mortuary Context and Taphonomy of the Bronze Age Commingled Tomb at Tell Abraq (2016)
The archaeological site of Tell Abraq (UAE) has been the subject of multiple studies since its original excavation by Dan Potts. For five seasons between 1989 and 1998 a team of archaeologist excavated the Bronze Age site. The analysis of mortuary context and taphonomy can provide invaluable insights into past biological and cultural conditions. The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can facilitate bioarchaeologists in the further investigation of mortuary placement of human remains...
Using GIS to Critique Federal Agricultural Policy of the 1930s on the Hector Backbone (2013)
Archaeologists typically focus on the mechanics of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GIS also possesses the capability to incorporate spatial data at a scale previously unfathomable by archaeologists and to aid in interpretations of social processes in the past. In order to evaluate the ways that GIS can be used as an interpretive tool I will critically examine the Federal Government’s purchase of over one hundred farms in the 1930s located along the Hector Backbone in Schuyler County New...
Using GIS to evaluate models of late Holocene settlement patterns in Northwest Alaska (2016)
Changing Arctic coastal settlement patterns are often linked to late Holocene environmental change. In northwest Alaska, archaeologists hypothesize that environmental variability was a major factor in both growing coastal population density between 1000 and 500 ya, and subsequent decreasing population density between 500 ya and the contact era. After 500 ya people dispersed to smaller settlements in coastal areas, and perhaps, upriver. This hypothesized pattern is based on older research that...
Using GIS to investigate mortuary practice and identity at the historic Spring Street Presbyterian Church, Manhattan (2016)
This paper focuses on the use of a geographical information system (GIS) as a tool to identify the distribution and association of mortuary artifacts and skeletal remains within the Spring Street Presbyterian Church burial vaults (ca.1820–1846). The GIS study presented here is one component of a microhistorical approach to exploring a 19th century neighborhood in New York City’s 8th Ward during a period of rapidly changing urban, social, and economic landscapes. Viewing the city through the lens...
Using Remote Sensing to Monitor and Predict the Inundation of the Abu Simbel Temples, Egypt (2017)
The Abu Simbel temples, commissioned by Ramesses II in Upper Egypt, are vulnerable to inundation due to the ancient structure’s proximity to the Nile River. Because of the rapid rise of water in the Lake Nasser reservoir, large swaths of land are becoming submerged. In order to monitor the recession of the peninsula in which the structure is located on, remote sensing techniques were employed. Using Landsat 5, 7, and 8 multispectral images coupled with SRTM data, change detection and risk maps...
Using Site Condition Data to Manage Heritage Sites for Climate Change Impacts (2016)
Heritage sites worldwide are threatened by human action and inaction; archaeologists are observers of the era of human-induced global change. We are specially positioned to use our data to examine such change through the material record. Additionally, archaeologists have been recording observations about the condition of sites for many years, even if those observations are not always intended to monitor site condition or integrity. Archaeologists in the National Park Service have, in maintaining...
Using Unmanned Aerial Systems and Historical Maps to Monitor Present and Predict Future Shoreline Impacts (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Case Studies from SHA’s Heritage at Risk Committee" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Natural and anthropogenic climate changes, specifically from sea-level rise, are drastically reshaping coastal waterways and shorelines. Few regional predictive models capture hyper-local changes. In response, this research project combined geospatial information captured with an unmanned areial system (AUS) with georeferenced maps...
A View from Somewhere: Mapping 19th-Century Cholera Narratives (2017)
Several scholars have explored the role of the empirical sciences in colonial contexts; far from a neutral study of the world, they were actively making and remaking material, social, and geographic boundaries. Cartography was part of these boundary-making practices, as the varying positions and views of actors engaging with the world are dissolved into the singular, authoritative view offered by the map. Studying a cholera epidemic that moved through the Caribbean in the 1850s, I consider how...
Viewsheds and Variability: the Red Ochre Burial Complex Revisited Geographically (2015)
The Red Ochre Burial Complex, like it’s later and more intensively studied Adena and Hopewell counterparts faces questions about its usefulness in understanding the cultural prehistory of the Western Great Lakes region. Over 50 years ago the complex was defined using a "trait list" approach. These traits are, for better or worse, still the clearest depiction of what is and is not a Red Ochre mortuary site. This study utilizes GIS to bring together disparate cultural data on a variety of Red...
Visualizing 19th century Nipmuc Landscapes (2017)
The Nipmuc people once lived seasonally mobile lifestyles among the lakes, rivers and hills of what is now Central Massachusetts. Colonial encroachment affected this lifestyle greatly, at first in the form of policed and restricted mobility and pressure from the colonial government to own and farm land in severalty, and then later, in the late 18th and early 19th c., the Nipmuc community was largely dispossessed of their land by surrounding Euro-American farmers. As a result, the 19th century...
Visualizing the visible: Mapping Access and Commodities at a 19th century Farmhouse (2013)
In this paper, I utilize GIS and other programs to explore the complexities of interior space in an early 19th century rural household. The E.H. and Anna Williams House in Deerfield, Massachusetts was lived in by the same family for much of the first half of the 19th century. The Williamses were wealthy, and filled their house with goods from around the world, in addition to the material necessities of running a working farm. Their house still stands today, as a museum, but what I will show is...
Visualizing with GIS at Stanford University Archaeology Collections: Open for Interpretation (2016)
GIS-based data visualization offers a dynamic, compelling tool not only for promoting on-campus collections, but also for studying and managing these resources within frameworks of engagement, openness, and reflexivity. The Stanford University Archaeology Collections (SUAC) cares for over 30,000 archaeological and ethnographic artifacts from campus lands and around the world. These items manifest a range of complex histories and present-day significances. The collections were recently...
The Walhain-Saint-Paul Project: Bringing new ideas and generations to the archaeological table since 1998. (2016)
Since 1998, the Walhain-Saint-Paul Project has connected the next generations of archaeologists on a global scale via a strong partnership between Eastern Illinois University and Belgium’s Archaeological Research Center (UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve). Through the excavation of our 13th century castle site, we have also engaged the local community, providing them with new ways to understand and protect their heritage. Our student’s backgrounds encompass a variety of subjects, making this project...
Wars of the Western Maya Kings: Military Conflicts in Lacandon Selva at the Turn of the Seventh to Eighth Centuries (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The last quarter of the seventh century was marked by the intensification of military and political struggle in the Ususmasinta Basin. Loss of control over the Western Lowlands by Kaanu’l power at this time led to wars between the largest political centers of the region—Piedras Negras, Palenque, Yaxchilan, Tonina, and Saktz’i. The Lacandon Selva (Chiapas...
Watch out for rocks: a GIS and Agent-Based Modeling approach to the rock art of Northwestern Iberia (2015)
Geographic Information Systems and high-resolution cartography (LIDAR), together with Agent-Based Modeling, are used for assessing the traditional view of open-air rock art as an active element in the shaping of the prehistoric landscape. Petroglyphs have been usually thought to play a major role in the configuration of the different significations of the prehistoric landscapes, their location repeatedly analyzed in terms of spatial proximity with paths and resource-rich areas that would have...
West Mancos Survey and Site Preservation Project, Southwest Colorado (2017)
The Ute Mountain Reservation in the Four-corners region of the American Southwest contains some of the most spectacular and numerous prehistoric archaeological sites containing standing architecture in the country. Combining research and preservation efforts at these sites is a priority of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Historic Preservation Office. The West Mancos Project focused on three sites along the Mancos River containing the remnants of circular towers. Preservation and research efforts...
What does GIS + 3D equal for Landscape archaeology? (2016)
Until recently, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have held center stage in the archaeologist’s geospatial toolkit. GIS has moved archaeologists beyond the map—but into what? In the early years, criticisms voicing GIS as environmentally-deterministic were abundant. In the ensuing years what methods and tool have archaeologists used to overcome these criticisms? How successful have we been? What shortcomings continue? New geospatial technologies such as airborne lidar and aerial photogrammetry...
When is a fieldhouse? Reconsidering fieldhouses on the Pajarito Plateau using GIS modeling and excavation data (2017)
Archaeologists often assume that Ancestral Pueblo groups in the North American Southwest built small one- to three-room structures to serve as temporary fieldhouse shelters for extracting agricultural resources during the farming season, and to minimize transportation to and from their larger villages. If fieldhouses were associated with agriculture, then they should be found near agriculturally productive fields. To determine if there is an association between agriculture and fieldhouses during...
Where the Buffalo Groan: Topographic Variables Governing the Placement and Spatial Organization of Wold Bison Jump, Wyoming (2016)
The Wold Bison Jump in Johnson County, Wyoming, is one of many prehistoric, mass kill sites scattered across the Plains. At Wold, a foraging basin of prime ungulate grazing habitat abuts the gently sloping backside of a bluff. Funnel-shaped drivelines of cairns extend across the top of the bluff towards a treacherous cliff. The drive was configured to constrain stampeding bison (Bison sp.) as prehistoric hunters communally drove them from the foraging basin to the precipice. Previous GIS...
Where the Conventional and Unconventional Meet: Marrying Tradition and Innovation in Lithic Use-wear Analysis (2016)
The majority of lithic use-wear research has been geared towards the development of newer more quantitatively precise methods involving evermore sophisticated forms of microscopy. As vital as such efforts are there is still a place in today’s interdisciplinary world for more traditional approaches when coupled with new ideas. This presentation will look at the results of a GIS analysis of experimental use-wear traces from images generated using conventional incident light microscopy....
Woodland Period Settlement Patterns at Letchworth Mounds (8JE337), Jefferson County, Florida (2016)
The Letchworth Mounds site (8JE337), located near Tallahassee in Jefferson County, Florida, is a predominately Woodland period site that encompasses the largest earth mound in Florida. In addition to this monumental earthwork, a number of smaller mounds survive and it is thought that as many as 20 mounds may have been lost to modern land use. During the summer of 2014, the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research and the Florida State University conducted a field school at the Letchworth Mounds...
You Sleep Alone, Away from People: Understanding the Movement of Hobos and Other Transient Laborers (ca. 1880 – 1940) (2017)
Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hobos and other transient workers crisscrossed the nation, taking temporary jobs wherever capital demanded labor that exceeded local resources. Despite their contingent status as surplus laborers, hobos were cast as morally bankrupt deviants, insane, and sexually ambiguous men by media outlets across the nation. State laws and county and town ordinances were summarily passed barring hobos from entering towns, cities, and otherwise populous...
Zooarchaeology and GIS: Enslaved and Free Black Diet at a Late Eighteenth– to Mid–Nineteenth–Century Delaware Farm, New Castle County, Delaware, United States (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "African American Voices In The Mid-Atlantic: Archaeology Of Elusive Freedom, Enslavement, And Rebellion" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeological investigations at Locus 1 of the Rumsey/Polk Tenant/Prehistoric site (7NCF112) in St. Georges Hundred, New Castle County, Delaware, United States have found spatially distinct features and artifacts that provide information about the lives of eighteenth–...