Using GIS to Predict the Location of Archaeological Sites in Amherst County

During Spring Semester (2009) Professor Rebecca Ambers and her students consulted with Professor Lynn Rainville to select geographical and geological attributes that correlate with human occupation sites (in other words, archaeological sites). The students, enrolled in ENVR 416 (Advanced GIS) evaluated geographic datasets using various raster analysis and modeling tools.

Professor Ambers created the following assignment for her students:

"GIS can be used to predict where sites might be found because people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tended to locate farm houses preferentially based on such criteria as accessibility to water, proximity to roads, flood potential, slope, aspect, elevation, etc.  The information below regarding optimal site criteria was provided by Dr. Lynn Rainville, the archaeologist who is heading up SBC's Tusculum Institute.
            The objective of this project is for you to create a raster map that shows the areas of the county most likely to yield archaeological sites.  Because the datasets you will be working with are divided up along USGS 1:24,000 topographic quadrangle map boundaries, different students will be in charge of different parts of the county.  At the end of the project, we will put all the datasets together into a single map that will be provided to Dr. Rainville and others involved in an archaeological and architectural survey of Amherst County."

 

To see the results of their research, click here.

 

Amherst County contains 1000s of pre-historic and historic sites. To better record the historic buildings in the county, Tusculum Institute is managing an architectural survey of Amherst County (funded by DHR and Amherst County). A local firm, The Antiquaries, has been hired to conduct the research between Fall 2009 and Summer 2010. To learn more about the project, click below.

http://antiquaries.com