Geospatial "Big Data" in Archaeology and the Enduring Challenge of Anthropological Significance

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeology has always been in the realm of "Big Data". Every site, feature and artifact holds a myriad of attributes that can be qualitatively and quantitatively recorded. While a near endless amount can be measured, the challenge has been identifying data that are actually connected to past human behavior that is of anthropological significance. This challenge remains in today’s new geospatial digital horizon of "Big Data". While the ever-expanding suite of geospatial technologies provide a plethora of data on potential past human landscape use, we still must ask if we are using these data to bring about new, anthropologically salient, insights into past human behavior. Here, we explore our own advances and shortcomings in terms of navigating this challenge in our work on precontact food storage features. We critically examine our use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAS) with lidar to characterize microtopography of precontact storage pits in the Great Lakes. We explore how such remote sensing can best integrated with theoretically-grounded geospatial analyses to examine environmental impacts of past societies on existing forests. Finally, we examine graph theory as a means to advance insights into not just current spatial distributions of past sites but actual past socioeconomic developments and connections.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24869