Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data

DOCUMENT Citation Only Morag Kersel.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Big data in the form of aerial imagery gathered from drones, satellites, and archival spy images provide an historical time line of change over time of archaeological landscapes. The images of sites negatively affected by agriculture, development, looting, and urban growth are compelling and convincing in their documentation of destruction....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nichole Sheldrick.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Heritage inventories are crucial for effective cultural heritage protection, especially during conflicts or disaster situations. Digital technologies, particularly remote sensing, are making it easier and faster than ever to create and disseminate these inventories, and collect data on a scale not previously possible. Since 2015, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert DeMuth. Joshua Wells. Kelsey Noack Meyers. Eric Kansa. Stephen Yerka.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In order for digitally published data to be useful it has to be useable, and in the case of big-data, interoperable with other data sources. This paper explores one way in which this can be accomplished through an examination of how archaeological site densities across the eastern and midwestern United States relate to social factors such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Palace. Meghan Howey. Franklin Sullivan.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology has always been in the realm of "Big Data". Every site, feature and artifact holds a myriad of attributes that can be qualitatively and quantitatively recorded. While a near endless amount can be measured, the challenge has been identifying data that are actually connected to past human behavior that is of anthropological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel VanValkenburgh.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The collection of geographically extensive archaeological datasets from satellite imagery and sensors mounted on piloted aircraft and UAVs is transforming how archaeologists study the past, enabling us to map sites in difficult terrain, at new levels of detail, and explore social and political transformations at the scale of large regions....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Huggett.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological data is notoriously tricksy: while we appreciate it is always incomplete, frequently unreliable, often replete with unknown unknowns, we nevertheless make the best of what we have and use it to build our theories and extrapolations about past events. Are data in a digital environment any different? Is there any reason to think...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Opitz.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores a tension in field practice and interpretation in landscape archaeology. Digital 3D topographic data have proliferated, and the increasing availability of lidar DTMs are transforming the practice of archaeological topographic interpretation. As a toolkit for interpretation tailored to this digital medium is being...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Mickel.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While members of the communities living near or on archaeological sites have frequently been hired around the world to dig on archaeological excavations, they have very rarely participated in the recording or documentation of those excavations. They have played even less of a role in designing the structures of either paper or electronic data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Casana.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Declassified CORONA spy satellite imagery, collected from 1960-1972, has proven to be a uniquely valuable resource for discovery, mapping, and interpretation of archaeological landscapes. These high-resolution, stereo photographic images preserve a picture of sites and cultural landscape features that have been impacted or destroyed by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Wernke.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What might it mean to see like a neural network over vast areas of ancient landscapes? Rapid advances in computer vision—especially approaches using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)—have made automated archaeological site and feature detection from satellite and aerial imagery over very large areas an achievable prospect. Such automated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Neha Gupta. Susan Blair. Ramona Nicholas.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In an era of cyber-infrastructures, large digital archaeological collections have the potential to enable deep insights into human history. Yet the life of digital archaeological data post-field recovery is not well understood, and consequently, issues of spatial data quality in large digital archaeological collections have been...