Remote Sensing Methods to Locate Archaeological Sites Through Vegetation Indices on the Florida Coast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Sea level rise is a growing threat to cultural heritage resources. Popular geospatial methods to identify at-risk sites work well for large-scale areas but are often overly laborious for the non-specialist to use and challenging to apply at a site-specific scale. Here, we create a Coastal Canopy Health Model, a method used to locate cultural resources in a non-homogenous coastal environment using tree health as a proxy measurement for archaeological sites. On the northeastern Florida coast, archaeologists have casually identified a correlation between certain types of vegetation, such as live oak and cedar trees, with shell-bearing archaeological sites. Test sites at the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTMNERR) indicated a statistically significant correlation between vegetation health indices and canopy height derived from LiDAR to detect the locations of archaeological sites in a mixed canopy coastal forest. The Coastal Canopy Health Model performed statistically significantly better than a random sampling at accurately locating known archaeological sites, thus showing promise for locating archaeological resources at risk efficiently and effectively with no-cost data sources.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40153.0