Pitfalls and Potentials of Paleoenvironmental Modeling at the Quarter Century

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.

Our ability to model paleoenvironments has improved dramatically over the last 25 years with improved technologies, new insights, and growing databases of proxy information. Oftentimes, the data we harness for archaeological modeling has been collected by interdisciplinary colleagues who pursue different questions, scales, and scopes of research. These datasets engender various challenges that should be recognized, analyzed, and integrated. The benefits of doing so are manifold, expanding our investigative and interpretive abilities. In this paper, I address some of the challenges we face at the quarter century. Additionally, I advocate bringing an anthropological lens to archaeological computational model building and describe a case study in which ethnographic and ethnohistoric data are integrated into paleoenvironmental models to furnish them with depth and richness. In doing so, paleoenvironmental models can become testable, thereby increasing their utility as well as our understandings of past human-landscape interactions.

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): 51408