GIS Approaches to Modeling the Shifting Andean Coastline through the Holocene

Summary

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

The long-term study of changing social and ecological patterns along the Andean coastal strip throughout the Holocene requires the identification of archaeological sites and their data of various ages. The presence of a broad continental shelf offshore of much of the Peruvian Andes has meant that early sites on this shelf have been inundated by early Holocene sea level rise. The rates of discovery of early and middle Holocene sites along the coast can be greatly assisted by the estimation of previous coastline locations, with an understanding that where the continental shelf is narrower, early sites will be more likely to exist on the shore today (as opposed to being inundated). Here we present ongoing GIS analysis of paleoshorelines, taking into consideration both sea level rise and coastal uplift over the Holocene. We seek to create relatively fine grained reconstructions of changing coastline, identifying no-longer existing bays and inlets which may have been attractive to early human occupants. This work will produce much more detailed models of Holocene sea coasts than have previously been proposed, and will form the basis for predictive locational models of site location for future research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25928