Pastoralist Land Use and Mobility in the Horn of Africa: An Archaeological Predictive Model

Summary

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

Archaeological Predictive Models (APMs) are a critical tool for archaeologists working across the globe; however, they are underutilized in continental Africa. As part of ongoing archaeological research in Djibouti, the Southeast Djibouti Regional Archaeological Project (SEDRAProject) developed an ArcGIS-based APM for pastoralist sites in the eastern Horn of Africa. The SEDRAProject APM uses three weighted ecological variables related to pastoralism to categorize areas of the eastern Horn as conducive, somewhat conducive, or less conducive to animal herding—and, by extension, to predict high-, medium-, and low-probability areas for finding pastoralist archaeological sites. This poster presents a discussion of the ecological variables that are included in the model, the results of model validation using Kvamme’s Gain statistic, and a mobility “case study” that uses the model as a cost surface for mapping least cost routes between coastal sites in Djibouti and Somaliland and interior sites in Djibouti, Somaliland, and Ethiopia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37462.0