Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
The archaeological record is uniquely positioned to answer big questions about human cultural change due to the vast spatial and temporal scope of the data. As such, anthropologists are increasingly analyzing and building large comparative archaeological datasets. Such broadscale analyses and syntheses of existing work have been proposed as key to answering questions about human behavior and evolution that are well outside the domain of other scientific fields. However, this kind of approach presents novel challenges; from what theories should guide our research, to how data should be collected, to how data should be analyzed and stored for posterity. In this session we invite researchers taking macroscale approaches to studying human culture and behavior to present on new findings, challenges, and solutions. Our goal is to provide a summary about the state of the art of macroscale archaeological research.
Other Keywords
Paleolithic •
Quantitative and Spatial Analysis •
Neolithic •
digital archaeology •
Dating Techniques •
Cultural Transmission •
Historic •
Machine Learning •
Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling •
demography
Geographic Keywords
Multi-regional/comparative •
Republic of Turkey (Country) •
North America (Continent) •
United States of America (Country) •
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Country) •
Italian Republic (Country) •
State of Israel (Country) •
Lebanese Republic (Country) •
Syrian Arab Republic (Country) •
West Bank (Country)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-13 of 13)
- Documents (13)
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Big Data Investigation of Persistence in Ethnically Homogenous and Heterogeneous Communities on the Late Nineteenth-Century Central Great Plains (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological record captures the material fallout of social processes operating at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Here I explore generational and supra-generational social processes of colonizers inhabiting a foreign and dynamic landscape under complex social conditions. Patent and census records allow for a big...
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A Big Look at Small Tools: An Analysis of the Emergence and Dispersal of Microliths in Eurasia (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The appearance of microliths and their rapid spread throughout Eurasia is one of the major developments in the evolution of Paleolithic technologies, since microliths and microblades, as part of complex modular tool packages, became the dominant technology in the Pleistocene (around 25,000 years ago) and persisted into the...
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Collaborative Research, Synthesis Centers, and the Challenge of Connecting the Past to the Present (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Synthesis in archaeology has traditionally been the province of the lone scholar, requiring heroic efforts of finding, integrating, and interpreting the results of published and unpublished reports. Such an approach is no longer tenable. The advent of CRM has led to a mountain of documented but only partially interpreted data....
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Combining Aerial Lidar and Deep Learning to Detect Archaeological Features in the Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge, Georgia (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A growing number of archaeologists are using lidar-derived high-resolution Digital Terrain Models (DTM) to detect and document archaeological features. Early adopters used visualizations to manually detect archaeological features; however, recent technological advances provide new tools that can considerably increase the...
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The COREX Project: Explaining Patterns of Genetic and Cultural Diversity in Prehistoric Europe (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This six-year international interdisciplinary project funded by the European Research Council (2021–2027) is bringing together the increasing quantity of genomic data available for prehistoric Europe and related macroscale archaeological data with the aim of exploring how small-scale processes generate large-scale patterns in...
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Cultural Macroevolution in the Upper Pleistocene and Holocene of Eastern Siberia and Western North America (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geneticists have used phylogenetic analyses to model population movements associated with emergence and movements of distinct populations in northeast Siberia and the Americas. However, archaeologists have rarely taken advantage of this approach to examine the emergence and radiation of cultural traditions in these regions. In...
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Machine Learning for Chronology Building in Regional-Scale Synthesis (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chronlogical control is essential for regional-scale research in order to establish contemporaneity or temporal sequences among spatially distributed assemblages. Archaeology has benefitted from advances in radiometric dating methods, as well as statistical protocols for combining dates to achive greater precision age...
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Macroscopic Comparative Studies of Archaeological Data: Spatiotemporal Variability in Lithic Technology of Paleolithic Asia (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Comparative studies using archaeological data on a broad spatiotemporal scale can provide an overview for investigating significant questions in human history and can promote discussions among scholars from different disciplines. This talk will present the results of a quantitative analysis of lithic technologies from the...
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On Effective Theories of Macroarchaeology (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology reconstructs human behavior in the past from a biased, sparse, and fragmentary record, at multiple scales of space and time, from site-specific local events, to regional, continental, and global patterns. However, in practice, it is not always clear at which scale we are asking archaeological questions, and how...
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Paleo Core: A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Paleontological, Archaeological, and Geological Data (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Data sharing, integration, and synthesis remain elusive goals for paleoanthropological and archaeological research into human biological and cultural origins, which relies on fossils, artifacts, and geological specimens collected by diverse, independent research teams. Integrating find data across these efforts is an...
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Proxies for the Agricultural Demographic Transition: How Well Do Radiocarbon Time-Series Track Crude Birth Rates? (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the adoption of agriculture, societies frequently experience several hundred years of dramatic intrinsic population growth, followed by a population stabilization or decline; together these patterns are called the Agricultural Demographic Transition (ADT). These patterns result from increased birth rates, which can...
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Rapid Increase in Production of Symbolic Artifacts after 45,000 Years Ago Is Not a Consequence of Taphonomic Bias (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Researchers have long been aware of an apparently rapid increase ca. 40,000–45,000 BP in the frequency of “symbolic” artifacts in the Old World paleolithic record. However, some hypothesize that if not for taphonomic loss the data would instead show a gradual increase in such artifacts’ frequency during the Middle Stone...
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Using ArchaMap to Help Datasets Talk to Each Other: A Case Study from Southwest Archaeology (2024)
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This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Center for Archaeology and Society Repository (CASR) at Arizona State University holds collections for thousands of archaeological sites. These collections are an important resource for the archaeological community, yet accessing them is difficult due to a lack of awareness of which sites are available. An exemplar of...