GIS Let Me See It: Building More Robust Models of Past Movement with Geospatial Modeling

Summary

Geospatial technologies allow archaeologists to study past social processes at a spatial scale previously unimaginable. Here, I ask how we may realize more fully the potential created by this fact, namely that these tools let us ask questions we have never asked, nor could think of asking, before we had access to them. I explore this by focusing on one area of study with a notable amount of untapped potential: movement. Archaeologists recover material items which show people moved themselves, their goods, and even other people, constantly and over tremendous distances in the past. Archaeologists have well-developed methodological and theoretical approaches for examining the static material phenomena resulting from movement. However, geospatial technologies present us new opportunities to model movement not just based on its static remains but in its dynamic context. I propose a combination of circuit-based modeling and least cost path analysis as a means of creating a broadly adaptable analytic framework that allows for more robust modeling of movement by accounting for its duality, for both its intension and extension, within past landscapes. I illustrate this analytic approach using one case study, Late Precontact (ca. AD 1200 – 1600) earthen enclosures in the Great Lakes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Methodological Tool or Paradigm Shifter? Assessing the Status of GIS in Archaeological Research

Keywords

Spatial Coverage