Identifying Ancient Intra-Monastic Pathways among Gandharan Buddhist Sites through GIS

Summary

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

This project focuses on identifying pathways between sites of the Gandharan Buddhist Civilization with the help of GIS technology to identify the locations of as-yet unfound Gandharan archaeological sites, which are under the threat of becoming permanently destroyed due to rapidly growing urbanism in the region. This project employed GIS principles and techniques for executing a least-cost analysis between the two major Gandharan Buddhist temple complexes of Mardan and Taxila. The project used ArcGIS Pro software to perform GIS analysis and produce maps. The project used 30-meter Aster Global DEM data from the EARTHDATA database of NASA. The project used the metabolic cost of walking for humans to create least-cost paths between the two sites. The result of the project identified more than one possible route between these Gandharan sites for Buddhist monks and other people to travel by foot. This project provides the baseline for archaeologists to do Lidar or field surveys along the proposed paths to discover additional Gandharan Buddhist archaeological sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41530.0