Putting a Man in the Machine: Experimental Archaeology and Computational Modeling

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In recent years, numerous studies have shown the importance of the links that existed between the various islands of the Caribbean archipelago in pre-Columbian times. The notion of connection has thus become the central paradigm of the approach of these island but not isolated societies. Thus, until now little addressed, the question of assessing the navigational capacities of these populations, which can be described as genuine maritime societies, has become central to their study and, in particular, to our understanding of their specific relationship to space. The first numerical simulation studies based on the study of drift phenomena did not or only slightly integrate the anthropogenic factor into their approach to the subject. The objective of this presentation will be to show how, both the evolution of our questions and the development of new types of simulations require us to take this factor into account more effectively. We will try in particular to show how the establishment of a dialogue between numerical modeling and experimental archaeology can only be extremely fruitful in this field.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24695