Searching for Evidence of Early Human Occupation of the New World with Aerial and Satellite Imagery

Summary

The pluvial lakes in the Mojave Desert, Which are today simply expanses of sand in nine years out of ten, were once large bodies of water, many of them linked together by streams and large rivers. Several were fed by the Mojave River, which introduced aquatic life. Fresh water clams were common along the beaches on lakes fed by the Mojave River, which were also places frequented by human groups that were attracted to the resources to be found there, among which were now extinct mega-fauna. Both Clovis and Western Stemmed tools have been found in the area that we investigating, which includes the playas known as Coyote Lake and Silver Lake. We are using synthetic aperture radar imagery produced from data collected from the NASA UAVSAR platform, Lidar, and multispectral and hyperspectral imagery to search for the shorelines of the pluvial lakes as they existed 13,000 to 20,000 years ago, with the objective of finding material altered by human activity on association with fresh water clam shells or other datable materials.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Digital Analysis of the Natural and Cultural Interface

Keywords

Spatial Coverage