Ancient Landscapes and Cosmic Cities out of Eurasia: Transdisciplinary Studies with New Lidar Mapping

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Ancient Landscapes and Cosmic Cities out of Eurasia: Transdisciplinary Studies with New Lidar Mapping" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We search for models of distinctive human biocultural evolutionary processes through transdisciplinary studies of purely aboriginal complex societies that developed out of Eurasia for millennia, particularly in the New World. Since they formed independently without the influence of the Old World civilizations until European contact, we expect to extract evolving behavioral characteristics of Homo sapiens through time. We particularly focus on human’s uniquely developed cognitive systems through which we conceptualize, categorize, and often quantify time, space, nature, and societies (ourselves). We record ancient ritual centers and/or cities three-dimensionally with newly developed mapping systems to elucidate ideological, technological, and social advances as materialized. Combining detailed and precise maps created by drone-lidar, Slam-lidar, scanner, or photogrammetry devices, with archaeological information, we apply them to our enhanced archaeoastronomy programs to better understand how humans developed cognitive systems to meaningfully divide and quantify time and space, often in relation to astronomical movements creating calendar systems, and finally located the nature and societies in them. We hope to ambitiously discuss the themes with experts in brain sciences, evolutionary psychology, and astronomy, among other related natural and social sciences.