Modeling Woodland Land Use in the Lower Little Miami River Valley, Ohio

Summary

This paper examines Woodland (ca. 1,000 BCE to 1,000 CE) land use patterns in the lower Little Miami River valley of Ohio. Theoretically, two models can be applied to the distribution of archaeological sites which date to the Woodland cultural period in this region: an ideological model based on ceremonial and mortuary behavior and a pragmatic model based on the socio-economic optimizing and risk-reducing behaviors of human evolutionary ecology. Archaeological data including artifact typology and composition, distance from food resources, raw material resources, and water at the time of occupation, elevation, geographic location, geological landform, relative and chronometric age, soil type and underlying stratigraphic composition, site size and type, and slope were collected from the Ohio Archaeological Inventory (SHPO), collector interviews, bucket auguring and soil probes, natural stream and ditch profiles, shovel testing, and systematic and opportunistic surface survey. These data were digitized and encoded into ArcGIS 10.3.1. Land use models were evaluated using multivariate regression analysis to understand the relationships between variables to determine and quantify variables that influenced observed patterns of Woodland site locations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage