Beyond (between, within, through) the Grid: The Contours of Mapping and GIS in Historical Archaeology

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are powerful tools available to archaeologists. This session explores the myriad ways in which GIS not only represents findings, but also generates new data and research questions to answer methodological and theoretical problems in archaeology. As Robb and Pauketat (2013:9) argue, archaeologists have "yet to break the scale barrier," and the challenge to keep in view both macro-scale and the microscale phenomena remains. As part of our discussion of GIS, this session therefore aims to explore how archaeologists consider scale, place, and space in their use of GIS. Further, we are also interested in how archaeologists incorporate time, which has often presented a challenge for archaeologists using GIS, into their analyses.

This session is broadly focused on the use of GIS to generate new questions and data. Within this general theme, topics may include novel uses of GIS; post-colonial geography; problems of scale; movement and migration; representations of time and space; embodied mapping; indigenous mapping; and the politics of representation that reemerge with visualization tools.