Placing The Past: Using GIS To Reconstruct The Maritime Landscape Of The Alexandria, Virginia Waterfront

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Current Research at the Conservation Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The town of Alexandria sits along the Potomac River in northeast Virginia. Established in 1749, Alexandria’s rich history spans over 250 years. During the late 18th and early 19th century, the waterfront underwent a drastic landscape transformation. To reconstruct the maritime landscape transformation, historical records and archaeological sites were incorporated into a GIS database to spatially analyze the development process. This process included the creation of artificial land to extend the town’s eastern shoreline deep into the channel. Investigations into the motives and methods for land creation were sparked by the discovery of four ships buried beneath the waterfront. Inclusion of the ship sites and historic structures in conjunction with economic, political, and population data, facilitated the tracking of shoreline transformation at a temporal scale previously inaccessible. Utilization of GIS also focused the deposition date range for the four ships, furthering our understanding of the historic transformation of Alexandria’s waterfront.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Current Research at the Conservation Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

Keywords

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 217