The Pennsylvania Precontact Predictive Model

Summary

In 2015, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration sponsored the development of a predictive model for prehistoric site locations in Pennsylvania. Since the development and release of the model, numerous surveys have been performed across the state, and many new prehistoric archaeological sites have been identified and mapped. During the 2016 and 2017 summers, undergraduate and graduate archaeology students participating the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s ESTI (Engineering, Scientific, and Technical Internship) program tested the efficacy and accuracy of the model. The 2016 interns mapped 132 phase 1 survey report results, locations and associated data into Pennsylvania’s Cultural Resources Geographic Information System (CRGIS), and subsequently conducted analysis with this new data. In 2017, the interns concentrated on new phase 1 survey and Pennsylvania Archaeological Site Survey (PASS) site data from eight counties: Erie, Delaware, Lancaster, Berks, Bucks, Chester, Lehigh, and Cumberland. While the conclusions we have reached in this paper are preliminary and will require more years of analysis to fully understand, they reveal several interesting trends in cultural resource management (CRM) archaeological testing methods and model accuracy in different topographic regions of the state.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20893