Understanding the Organization of Built Space Using Spatial Statistics in GIS

Summary

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

Archaeologists who study the hillforts of Northwest Iberia have often used the layouts of individual settlements as the basis for inference and speculation on a wide range of phenomena, largely toward the end of establishing some understanding of the "social structure" of Iron Age communities. This often amounts, however, to little more than informal visual inspection of illustrated plan maps. In order to meaningfully interpret the spatial properties of the internal organization of a settlement, it is necessary for researchers to clearly define those properties and to develop methods that are capable of measuring and describing them, if not quantitatively then at least as systematically as possible with reference to some explicit set of criteria. The methodological toolkit of Space Syntax presents itself as a candidate for these purposes, and its potential for use in archaeological contexts has been steadily explored ever since its conception in the 1980s. Space Syntax must be heavily modified to make it compatible with archaeological applications, however, due to the incomplete nature of archaeological evidence and the limitations of the framework itself. Toward that end, I propose a new set of GIS-based tools and procedures for the systematic description of spatial properties in archaeological settlements.

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): 37098.0