Methodological Tool or Paradigm Shifter? Assessing the Status of GIS in Archaeological Research

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark McCoy.

Initial worries about the adverse effect the adoption of GIS would have on archaeology in terms of environmental determinism have proved to be unwarranted. Today, as spatial technology has evolved and become integrated into the discipline, we must rise to a new set of challenges posed by the sheer size and complexity of data we use and produce. Field survey and excavations regularly yield far more pieces of spatial information than ever before. At the same time, the amount of available satellite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Jones.

In this paper, I explore the relationship between method and theory in spatial archaeology that employs Geographic Information Systems (GIS). I do this through an examination of the settlement ecology of societies of varying sociopolitical complexity in the Southeastern United States. I use GIS to estimate past environments and landscapes and record attributes of settlement sites, their catchments, and surrounding areas, which I then analyze using spatial statistical methods. Comparisons of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Howey.

Geospatial technologies allow archaeologists to study past social processes at a spatial scale previously unimaginable. Here, I ask how we may realize more fully the potential created by this fact, namely that these tools let us ask questions we have never asked, nor could think of asking, before we had access to them. I explore this by focusing on one area of study with a notable amount of untapped potential: movement. Archaeologists recover material items which show people moved themselves,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Wernke. Teddy Abel Traslaviña.

GIS in archaeology has diversified beyond its origins as a map-and-database and predictive modeling tool to explore multidimensional views of human experience in the past. This paper combines models of movement and visibility at the scale of a single settlement to render an approximation of sensory experience within the built environment of a planned colonial town in highland Peru. In the 1570s, some 1.5 million native Andeans were forcibly resettled to “reduction towns” (reducciones) based on a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marieka Brouwer Burg.

While the benefits of GIS are widely touted among archaeologists today, less attention has been paid to the potential pitfalls and drawbacks of this undeniably important methodological tool. One of the greatest challenges of geospatial modeling is unbalanced data; due to the nature of the archaeological record, we can never assume that the remnants of past behavioral processes we are working with constitute a fully representative sample. Rather, our datasets are reflective of differential social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Gustas. Kisha Supernant. Andrew Martindale. Bryn Letham. Kenneth Ames.

Spatial modeling of early prehistoric maritime movements on the Pacific Northwest Coast is important in contemporary archaeology as a site prospection tool in a landscape which has radically changed over the last 16,000 years. GIS analysis can model ancient site locations now hidden by changing sea levels. We present findings from a project which developed a new method for modeling maritime movement using least cost path analysis (LCA) of both behavioral and cultural constraints to determine the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Earley-Spadoni.

GIS analysis can helpfully intervene in highly-theorized debates about archaeological landscapes by allowing archaeologists to empirically evaluate assertions about (inter)visibility. In recent decades, visibility studies have clarified the sociocultural significance of structures such as tombs, settlements, signalling installations and other landscape markers. However, it is often difficult to evaluate inter-visibility and challenging to distinguish intentionally-constructed inter-visibility...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raymond Hunter. Steve Kosiba.

Recent GIS studies of colonialism combine archival and archaeological data to understand and map changes in political economy, such as settlement patterns, land use, and population aggregations. Such studies often overlook how colonial politics centered on the transformation of value—the social significance of the things and resources that constituted social life. This paper develops a GIS method to document shifts in land value in the Inca imperial capital (Cusco, Peru), during the long process...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Whitley.

More than 25 years since Allen et al. (1990), GIS has become a tool used almost as ubiquitously in archaeology as the trowel and the total station. But is it a “paradigm-shifter?” One fundamental distinction between archaeology and other scientific pursuits is the lack of a formal experimental procedure for testing large-scale hypotheses. We can work with recreated material culture or anything else on a 1:1 scale. However, ideas about larger mechanisms, particularly those that encompass wide...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Richards-Rissetto.

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...