Applying Circuit Theory to Colonial Expansion Modeling in the Great Bay Estuary, New England.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

During the early 1600s, the Great Bay Estuary was a frontier colonial settlement that rapidly became an economic hub for the extraction and export of natural resources into the West Indies trade network. Being directly accessible from the Atlantic coast of modern-day New Hampshire, the Great Bay Estuary provided a logical point of entry for water vessels and served as a corridor into the surrounding area. Thus, colonization and the accompanying land-use changes in this landscape are known to have expanded outwards from the estuary. We use Circuit Theory to develop a model of early colonial activity to understand the potentialities inherent for European settlers inhabiting a deeply unfamiliar landscape. The model emphasizes the influence of navigable waters, topography, and access to adequate moisture for agriculture on the decisions of the colonizing English. We generate a series of current maps using Circuitscape software and compare the density of electrical currents at known archaeological sites to the surrounding landscape. We aim for this case study to inform the use of Circuit Theory in modeling human activities in past landscapes and aid in the development of new techniques for understanding the processes of colonization and expansion in landscapes around the world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32807