Utilizing Cumulative Viewshed Analysis to Explore Virgin Branch Ancestral Pueblo Settlement Choice

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Prehistoric habitation structures located in the Mount Trumbull region of northwest Arizona are constructed across a diverse topographic landscape. Several archaeological site records for the Mt. Trumbull region allude to the exceptional views from habitation structures despite their often non-obtrusive locations. The following study utilizes Geographic Information Systems (GIS); Cumulative Viewshed Analysis (CVA); and site suitability analysis to facilitate understanding of patterns and relationships among archaeological habitation sites located in this exceptionally diverse landscape. Using CVA, this study endeavors to characterize habitation sites as linked in two ways. The first is geographic. Are habitation sites intervisible? The second means of connection concerns material remains. Do habitation sites share material similarity based on temporal phases? This research seeks to improve current knowledge of Ancestral Pueblo settlement patterns and determine if the geographic location of habitation sites predicts the structure of their material remains; and if so, would this provide evidence for the existence of prehistoric communities? Based on the results from several viewshed analyses, data suggests that the placement of known habitation sites across the landscape significantly differs when compared to sample "non-site" locations suggesting that known habitation sites were constructed in areas of the landscape that favored intervisibility.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology of the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23811