Information Transmission Rates in the Early Colonial Southeast: Estimating On-Foot Travel Time over Established Native American Trails across the Region

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Among the myriad contributions David Anderson has made to American archaeology are his multiple collaborations with researchers using GIS (including myself) to extract new and useful data from multiscalar and multitemporal spatial datasets. As a graduate student of his, I learned that new and valuable information can often be wrestled from older sources. This paper presents the initial results of work inspired by—and directly influenced by—David Anderson’s advice and interests. Myer’s “Indian Trails of the Southeast” (1928) contains a map depicting the “trail system of the Southeastern United States in the early colonial period.” The map, purportedly sourced by Myer from hundreds of reports, depicts an extensive network of trails connecting various modern and historic locations. After digitizing the trails into a GIS environment, I used cost-distance and travel-time functions to estimate travel times between various key locations. The results provide a realistic basis for estimating on-foot travel time across the US Southeast, and a perspective on the speed at which information and materials could have moved around the region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• *SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39966.0