Islands on the Plains Revisited: GIS-Based Predictive Models of Playa Use on the Southern High Plains

Summary

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

Landscape Archaeology is useful in providing a framework for understanding human movements across various environments. Such an approach relates landscapes as they evolved through time to settlement patterns of human groups occupying the area. Cultural behaviors can then be linked to physiographic and topographic features using such an approach. On the Southern High Plains of northwestern Texas and eastern New Mexico on an otherwise seamless terrain, playas are the dominant features on the landscape. These disparate islands were attractive to groups occupying the region as they provided seasonal water and a variety of resources. The relationship throughout the late Quaternary between hunter-gatherer mobility and these basins is explored through GIS predictive modeling. GIS-based data on such features provides a valuable tool to assist in the reconstruction of these landscapes not only spatially but within a temporal scale. More specifically, the goal is to understand the relationship between the development of playa basins and the movement of groups occupying the Southern High Plains during the late Quaternary, particularly during the late Pleistocene and the early Holocene.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25160