Modeling Mobility in Inland Waters

Summary

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

While rivers, lakes, lagoons, and estuaries were commonly navigated in prehistory, the only well-established methods for modeling aquatic human movement are restricted to the open sea. A small handful of researchers have proposed methods and/or attempted to simulate travel in rivers and lakes, but these methods have not been consolidated into a user-friendly, GIS-based format. This avenue of research is difficult since variables such as vessel type, mode of propulsion, assumed navigational skill, type of inland water body, surface current patterns or flow rates, wind patterns, and seasonality, among other factors, all need to be appropriately addressed in these simulations. Adapting the methods used for simulating intentional and drift maritime voyages and learning from past attempts at simulating navigation in rivers and lakes, I propose procedures that can be applied in standard GIS software to model human movement in inland waters. I demonstrate these procedures using case studies from my research in Southern Central America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25238