A Predictive Model of Archaeological Site Location in the Hodh ech Chargui Region, Mauritania

Summary

This paper presents a model to determine potential archaeological site locations in far southeastern Mauritania (known as the Hodh ech Chargui). Although sustained archaeological research has been carried out throughout West Africa since the 1940s, the 81,000 km2 Hodh ech Chargui region has been poorly examined, with two regional surveys constituting the majority of the archaeological record for the area. It has been proposed that the Hodh ech Chargui served as a place of passage between the two Early to Late Iron Age population centers in the Hodh Depression and the Middle Niger Delta, rather than a place of settlement itself (MacDonald 2009: 45). The preliminary results of this model provide a foundation for testing this hypothesis, and more broadly illustrate the potential for GIS and remote-sensing based approaches to plan research in areas of interest throughout the ancient world.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage