This figure comes from my paper (Kelly et al., 2023) published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. On the right is a model of European colonial dispersal from the central waterbodies of the landscape. On the left are zoomed-in views of three archaeological sites showing how the model changed using different underlying spatial data.

In this paper, I integrated hydrography data from the National Hydrography Database, a Digital Elevation Model from USGS, and Landforms data from The Nature Conservancy to model the spread of European Colonists into a coastal New England landscape during the 17th and 18th centuries. Using these datasets, I created resistance raster surfaces representing how each variable influenced colonial activity and then used Circuitscape (circuitscape.org) to simulate how colonists dispersed into the landscape. I ran simulations using three different combinations of the surface variables (TNW, LNW, & All) and validated the resulting current maps by calculating zonal statistics around known archaeological sites. The model successfully simulated higher human activity around archaeological sites relative to random locations across the landscape and represented the first application of omnidirectional Circuitscape modeling in the field of archaeology using the point-based method developed for conservation planning by Koen et al. (2014). The surfaces created for this project are freely available here: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/56vyyyhf5b/1

References

Kelly, D. R., Clark, M. M., Palace, M., Howey, M. C. L. (2023). Expanding omnidirectional geospatial modeling for archaeology: A case study of dispersal in a “New England” colonial frontier (ca. 1600–1750). Journal of Archaeological Science, 150, 105710. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2022.105710

Koen, E.L., Bowman, J., Sadowski, C., Walpole, A.A., (2014). Landscape connectivity for wildlife: development and validation of multispecies linkage maps. Methods Ecol. Evol. 5, 626–633. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.12197.