Mapping a Large Scale Amazonian Landscape using GIS

Summary

Among the many challenges for landscape archaeologists is the “palimpsest” nature of the landscapes that they try to study. Archaeologists around the world have long been at work using GIS to study a wide range of questions across scales from meters to thousands of kilometers, and from single occupations to thousands of years. Thinking of archaeological landscapes as a palimpsest uses the recognition that connecting individual landscape features exclusively to a single moment or period of time is not possible. In a case study from the Southwestern Amazon, a landscape of earthworks that are now accessible in public domain imagery, was mapped in detail over about 10,000 km2, and can now be more easily analyzed at several scales. A palimpsest interpretation of this landscape, based on this more comprehensive dataset, makes possible new interpretations of the connection between spatial patterns and Amazonian histories, at several scales.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• More than a Label: Social Complexity, Variability and Social Diversity in the Orinoco and Amazon Basins

Keywords

Spatial Coverage