Archiving and Using the Oaxaca Survey Data Part 2: Synthesizing Spatial and Temporal Data

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This aspect of the Oaxaca Survey project focuses on the construction of a macroregional GIS database for the more than 10,000 archaeological site components and structures from eight systematic regional surveys (1971-2011). Component data originally recorded in the field on aerial photographs and later published as 4km grid square component maps were mosaiced into a unified geodatabase. This was accomplished through vectorization of the component map grid squares and georeferencing over 300 aerial photographs, all of which was completed using freely available open-source software. University of Georgia Laboratory of Archaeology (UGAL) staff were trained in the use of the Inkscape vector drawing software for converting scans of the component maps into vector data and QGIS for handling the georeferencing of the aerial photos and compiling vector and raster data into a comprehensive geodatabase. While this effort proved to be very time-intensive, it serves as a roadmap for how large legacy datasets can be revitalized and modernized in order to: train and familiarize undergraduate researchers with the modeling of geospatial data; answer questions requiring data at the broadest and narrowest spatiotemporal extents; and to make the results accessible to broad, non-specialist audiences, including those at the K-12 level.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52721