Predictive Modeling of Archeological Sites in Death Valley National Park

Summary

Predictive Modeling of Archeological Sites in Death Valley National Park

Lindsey Cochran and Tad Britt.

Archeologists have long worked to develop predictive modeling tools, techniques, and methods, as it is well known that human habitation locations are patterned and often align with environmental constraints. The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT) and the National Park Service (NPS) have developed methods to move a database with over 2,000 archaeological sites into a statistical prototype based on Maximum Entropy niche modeling. Layers of DEM, LiDAR, GIS, environmental data, and information from state site files combine to produce statistical and graphical readouts of a grid-based model of archaeological sites. The resulting models determine the probability of the occurrence of cultural resources in the park by displaying potential spatial and temporal locations of cultural resource sites in Death Valley National Park as well as to create quantitative readouts of the veracity and percent contribution of each environmental variable. This paper will discuss methods undertaken to identify and eliminate bias within raw datasets, then examine how these changes influenced our interpretation of the model accuracy and directions for future development.

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

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• 20 Year Retrospective of National Center for Preservation Technology and Training sponsored Archaeology.

Keywords

Spatial Coverage