Methodological Improvements in Landscape Archaeoacoustics: Exploring the Effects of Vegetation and Ground Cover

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent development in the field of landscape archaeoacoustics has resulted in improved GIS-based soundshed modeling solutions, however, it has also led to the identification of several limitations of these tools. Foremost among these limitations is the lack of reliable modeling capability to explore the effects of vegetation attenuation or variable ground cover types on audibility. While these limitations do not impact the study of archaeoacoustics in fairly homogenous landscapes, use of these tools in a landscape of ecotones can result in the production of audibility maps and models which do not reflect the ecological and anthropogenic variation in sonorous environments. This study describes the current state of soundshed modeling; provides a detailed examination of the challenges and tools available to model vegetation attenuation, variable ground cover types, and other impacts to acoustic transmission paths; and explores solutions to these obstacles. The results of this analysis will be discussed in relation to the "Soundshed Analysis Toolbox" (presented in Primeau and Witt 2018), written in Python script for use in ArcGIS. Ultimately, this research will be used to improve the toolbox allowing landscape scale soundshed modeling to be applied to a vast array of site locations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24109