GIS as a Hub for Archaeological Landscapes Research

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 2" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In a recent meta-analysis of archaeological GIS publication trends (Ullah, Clow, and Meling, 2024), my colleagues and I determined that the major focus in archaeological GIS advancement has been methodological rather than theoretical and that GIS cannot yet be considered a paradigm for spatial thinking in archaeology despite more than 40 years of integration within the discipline. In this paper, I will sketch out a vision for centralizing GIS as a hub around which to integrate landscape studies in archaeology. I will argue that the digital nature, inherent spatiality, and extensibility of GIS software gives it a unique position in landscape archaeology workflows. More than “just a tool,” however, GIS can also be an epistemology for investigating spatial phenomena in archaeology, and so can act as a bridge between the diverse approaches and concepts employed by a diverse set landscape archaeology practitioners. Pragmatically, GIS is also well-poised to be this connector due to its ubiquity and long history within the discipline. I will attempt to showcase how, with a few reflexive adjustments to how archaeologists tend to view and employ GIS in our work, we can make significant headway towards centering GIS as a theory-building framework in landscape archaeology studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 2   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51315