Buried Archaeological Sensitivity Modeling in the Pacific Northwest

Summary

ICF assisted the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) with the preparation of a buried archaeological sensitivity model in support of a client-sponsored research project in Seattle, Washington. ICF approached the model development from a statewide scale and employed geologic landform type and soil age as main model inputs. Surface geology data was not available at a large enough scale to support the entire effort so ICF combined national resource conservation soil data attributed with soil parent material with surface geology units at a scale of less than 1:100,000 to cover soil data gaps. After statewide data coverage was achieved, landform and parent material types were normalized based on geomorphic origin, and then assigned to a target geologic epoch (Holocene or Pleistocene and older). ICF then tested this model with 200 previously recorded archaeological site locations. This presentation presents the methods and results used to develop and test this model, and discusses the potential of this model to be an efficient and practical modeling approach for modeling buried archaeological sensitivity across larger regional areas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17592