The Grateful Dead: A GIS Approach to Determining the Correlation between Habitation Sites and Burial Sites in the Woodland Period in Iowa

Summary

A powerful function of GIS is to look at spatial distributions of different components of settlement systems. During the Woodland Period, there appears to have been fundamental changes in economic and social organization, during the transition from hunting and gathering to substantial dependence on maize agriculture. Increasing dependence on maize agriculture appears to be correlated with increases in population and number of sites in the Late Woodland. What is less clear is the relationship between the number of burial mounds and the decreasing prominence of elite burials. While there has been an abundant amount of research conducted in locating mounds and burial sites using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology, there has been very little research done in looking at the correlation between burial sites and habitation sites in the Midwest region of North America. This project focuses on the Woodland period in the state of Iowa, which lasted from 500 B.C. to 1000 A.D., and will look at how the spatial distribution of these sites changes from the Early, Middle, and Late Woodland periods. This will be done by using the program Arc GIS, and the 1412 distinct habitation and burial sites in Iowa.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21418