A Demography of Materials: High Resolution Multispectral Photogrammetry in Theory and Practice

Summary

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

The recent availability of small multispectral sensors small enough to equip on unmanned aerial systems (UASs0 now allows archaeologists to survey the landscape at increasingly finer resolutions (10-20 cm) with topographic and compositional data. While at present the number of published archaeological studies using UAS-equipped multispectral cameras is small, there is a consensus that the resulting data products are capable of detecting certain buried features. Nevertheless, despite the number of methodological and theoretical considerations associated with data available at final scales the basic principles and forms of analysis reported thus far are identical to those performed at broader scales of analysis and do not exploit the full swath of additional information higher-resolution data can provide. At the heart of the issue is the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) applied to spatial resolution. The MAUP describes the phenomenon where the same analyses lead to diverging results depending on the scale and boundaries by which data is aggregated. Using data from different parts of Mesoamerica, I present a novel community-based spectral analysis method avoid the MAUP by considering the proximal and ultimate mechanisms that allow archaeological features to be visible in multispectral imagery and their theoretical and methodological implications.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26200