Conference Presentations by Dan Savage
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In 2012, a settlement survey was conducted on the North Vaca Plateau in west-central Belize as pa... more In 2012, a settlement survey was conducted on the North Vaca Plateau in west-central Belize as part of the Social Archaeology Research Program (SARP). The survey was intended to test the predictions of a new archaeological potential assessment method called the Locally-Adaptive Model of Archaeological Potential (LAMAP). A LAMAP assessment was produced for Minanha, a Classic Maya civic-ceremonial center, which served as the first case study for the new method. When conducting the survey to test the LAMAP predictions, however, the survey team found that modern forest cover made it impossible to complete a survey with sufficient coverage to adequately validate the model in a reasonable amount of time. Thus, a LiDAR survey was commissioned to supplement the field results. The LiDAR imagery proved very useful for identifying cultural features beneath the canopy with much greater efficiency than could be accomplished using traditional methods. In this paper we report a comprehensive test of the LAMAP assessment using a combined LiDAR and traditional survey dataset. We find that our understandings of Maya settlement patterns, and our ability to assess locational models like LAMAP, are significantly improved with the use of the combined dataset.
Paper presented at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology on April 16 in San Francisco, California.
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Peer Reviewed Papers by Dan Savage
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2017
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Extensive archaeological surveys are critica... more Please email or message us for a pdf of the article.
Extensive archaeological surveys are critical for understanding past human-landscape interaction, but they are frequently impeded by access difficulties, rugged terrain, or obscurant vegetation. These challenges can make extensive surveys prohibitively costly and time-consuming. Consequently, many archaeologists are interested in predictive techniques—i.e., methods that can estimate the potential for a given region to contain archaeological remains. Predictive techniques can reduce the costs of extensive surveys by allowing archaeologists to focus on the regions with the greatest archaeological potential. A few years ago, our research team developed a new technique called the Locally-Adaptive Model of Archaeological Potential (LAMAP) and used it to enhance our understanding of the relationship between the Classic Maya centre of Minanha, its surrounding landscape, and nearby Maya centres (Carleton et al. 2012). However, when we introduced the method its efficacy had yet to be comprehensively tested. Recently, we tested its efficacy using a combination of ground-truth survey and remote sensing of Classic Maya sites in west-central Belize. The test involved identifying previously unrecorded archaeological resources and comparing their locations to the LAMAP prediction and to a random model that acted as a null hypothesis. Our results indicate that the model performs very well. The high-potential areas of the study region contained three times more archaeological sites than low potential areas, a statistically significant result compared to our null model. Our findings indicate that the LAMAP is a useful new archaeological prediction tool and, as a corollary, that the hypothesis of human land-use behaviour underpinning it might accurately reflect the behaviour of the Classic Maya.
Keywords
Classic Maya; GIS; Predictive modeling; LiDAR; Survey; Human-landscape interaction
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Conference Presentations by Dan Savage
Paper presented at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology on April 16 in San Francisco, California.
Peer Reviewed Papers by Dan Savage
Extensive archaeological surveys are critical for understanding past human-landscape interaction, but they are frequently impeded by access difficulties, rugged terrain, or obscurant vegetation. These challenges can make extensive surveys prohibitively costly and time-consuming. Consequently, many archaeologists are interested in predictive techniques—i.e., methods that can estimate the potential for a given region to contain archaeological remains. Predictive techniques can reduce the costs of extensive surveys by allowing archaeologists to focus on the regions with the greatest archaeological potential. A few years ago, our research team developed a new technique called the Locally-Adaptive Model of Archaeological Potential (LAMAP) and used it to enhance our understanding of the relationship between the Classic Maya centre of Minanha, its surrounding landscape, and nearby Maya centres (Carleton et al. 2012). However, when we introduced the method its efficacy had yet to be comprehensively tested. Recently, we tested its efficacy using a combination of ground-truth survey and remote sensing of Classic Maya sites in west-central Belize. The test involved identifying previously unrecorded archaeological resources and comparing their locations to the LAMAP prediction and to a random model that acted as a null hypothesis. Our results indicate that the model performs very well. The high-potential areas of the study region contained three times more archaeological sites than low potential areas, a statistically significant result compared to our null model. Our findings indicate that the LAMAP is a useful new archaeological prediction tool and, as a corollary, that the hypothesis of human land-use behaviour underpinning it might accurately reflect the behaviour of the Classic Maya.
Keywords
Classic Maya; GIS; Predictive modeling; LiDAR; Survey; Human-landscape interaction
Paper presented at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology on April 16 in San Francisco, California.
Extensive archaeological surveys are critical for understanding past human-landscape interaction, but they are frequently impeded by access difficulties, rugged terrain, or obscurant vegetation. These challenges can make extensive surveys prohibitively costly and time-consuming. Consequently, many archaeologists are interested in predictive techniques—i.e., methods that can estimate the potential for a given region to contain archaeological remains. Predictive techniques can reduce the costs of extensive surveys by allowing archaeologists to focus on the regions with the greatest archaeological potential. A few years ago, our research team developed a new technique called the Locally-Adaptive Model of Archaeological Potential (LAMAP) and used it to enhance our understanding of the relationship between the Classic Maya centre of Minanha, its surrounding landscape, and nearby Maya centres (Carleton et al. 2012). However, when we introduced the method its efficacy had yet to be comprehensively tested. Recently, we tested its efficacy using a combination of ground-truth survey and remote sensing of Classic Maya sites in west-central Belize. The test involved identifying previously unrecorded archaeological resources and comparing their locations to the LAMAP prediction and to a random model that acted as a null hypothesis. Our results indicate that the model performs very well. The high-potential areas of the study region contained three times more archaeological sites than low potential areas, a statistically significant result compared to our null model. Our findings indicate that the LAMAP is a useful new archaeological prediction tool and, as a corollary, that the hypothesis of human land-use behaviour underpinning it might accurately reflect the behaviour of the Classic Maya.
Keywords
Classic Maya; GIS; Predictive modeling; LiDAR; Survey; Human-landscape interaction