Describing Accessibility Landscapes: GIS Models of Movement Potential in Iron Age Southeast Arabia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pedestrians: Current Research in GIS-Based Movement Modeling for Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper presents analysis of movement potential at regional and local scale to describe the accessibility landscape of Iron Age (1300-300 BCE) Southeast Arabia. Interpreting the reasons for and outcomes of changing settlement patterns rely on descriptions of accessibility. During the Iron Age, permanent architecture first appears in the desert and mountain zones and expansion of the settlement pattern has implications for accessibility, often referenced implicitly in archaeological work: some sites are located in more remote areas, perhaps for proximity to raw materials or distance from rising political complexity in the long-settled hills and coasts, some sites are located possible for trade, overlooking mountain routes or possibly supporting camel transport in the desert. Evaluating the import of settlement pattern requires understanding how people would have moved around their landscape. GIS-modeling provides a consistent and reproducible method for describing the landscape in terms of pedestrian accessibility. This paper uses two origin-independent methods (From Everywhere To Everywhere models and Accumulated Cost Corridors) to characterize the accessibility landscape of Iron Age Southeast Arabia. This probabilistic, rather than deterministic, approach to describing the accessibility landscape demonstrates regional patterns of movement potential and allows for the comparison of local accessibility landscapes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Ancient Pedestrians: Current Research in GIS-Based Movement Modeling for Archaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51819