Innovative Applications of Archaeological Perspectives: An Analysis of Home Front Material Culture within the Context of Individual vs. Municipal Investments in Oakland, CA

Summary

Through the growth and development of satellite imagery and panoramic street photography championed by Google Earth, a mass archive of accessible imagery has been created documenting intimate material worlds frozen in space and time. Utilizing these newly available forms of public data, our team (built of one historical archaeologist, one GIS technician, and one statistician) conducted a virtual pedestrian survey of 1000 randomly selected home fronts in Oakland, California, implementing a five-facet rating scale to document evidence of resident investment. Personal investment was compared to city investment to test for bias in use of replacement strategies within negatively characterized neighborhoods as opposed to refinement within positively characterized neighborhoods. We argue that through innovative selection of subject material, interdisciplinary collaborations, and the utilization of all available tools, historical archaeology will continue to expand in scope and relevance.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Directions in Historical Archaeology: Theory, Method, and Practice   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage