Creating a Geospatial-Temporal Database for California’s Central Coast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

California’s Central Coast is characterized by a variety of environments that would have offered indigenous peoples a plethora of resources for nearly ten thousand years. Over the course of nearly a century of archaeological investigations, thousands of sites have been identified in the region. Since the 1950s, radiocarbon dating has offered relatively precise absolute age estimates for site occupations. In addition to chronological estimates, landscape archaeology has extended the unit of analysis to spatial units encompassing multiple sites across a diversity of environmental zones. Bridging spatial and temporal data offers an insightful picture of the prehistoric regional chronology of the central coast region. To achieve this goal, this project presents novel and innovative methods for combining spatial and temporal data into a single digital platform incorporating the location of approximately 2,000 archaeological sites within the counties of Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Monterey. Moreover, more than 600 radiocarbon dates are also included with the spatial data in a single comprehensible structure. Finally, this geospatial-temporal database framework can incorporate newly identified sites and radiocarbon dates resulting in a flexible and dynamic tool for archaeological research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36455.0