Weathering the Tropics: The Problem of Archaeological Data Collection and Understanding Settlement Systems, Socio-Ecological Dynamics, Human-Thing Entanglements, and the Resiliency of Tropical Societies

Summary

The settlement sub-project of the Socio-Ecological Entanglement in Tropical Societies (SETS) investigations was executed by engaging a variety of data collection methods in order to assess the development and overall organization of settlements of support populations in a sample of pre-industrial tropical societies from South and Southeast Asia, and Mesoamerica. This presentation explores the diverse types, character, and quality of the data employed in the study, and underscores how, when combined within a broader comparative study, the strengths and weaknesses of the various regional data sets can be productively evened out to provide a general understanding of settlement patterns in the pre-industrial tropics. Specific attention is paid to the methods utilized in the examination of the dispersed urban settlements characteristic of tropical environments, while also providing a comparison of the utility of each method of archaeological data collection. Data proximity and ground-truthing are argued to be crucial tools that should be used in conjunction with extensive literature reviews, ground surveys, and extant GIS datasets (including LiDAR) in efforts to examine the complex socio-ecological relationships, human-thing entanglements, resiliency of support populations, individual settlement nodes, and larger political formations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• An Introduction to the Socio-ecological Entanglement in Tropical Societies (SETS) Project

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15679