Remotely Sensed Big Data and Iterative Approaches to Cultural Feature Detection and Past Landscape Process Analysis

ABSTRACT

The concept of “big” data is nothing new to archaeologists; we have long made a profession of collecting, organizing, and analyzing a surfeit of data describing everything from minute artifact attributes to landscape-wide environmental characteristics. Regardless of this abundance, we have and continue to confront the self-same problem inherent in “big” data, namely what analyses will actually help us use these data to advance understandings of past human behaviors. With burgeoning remote sensing technologies archaeology faces a new wave of “big” data, but how do these techniques improve our ability to make the inferential leaps to bridge the present to the past and bring new insights forward? We argue that, to date, remote sensing techniques (satellite, aerial, and unpersonned aerial imagery) have been applied somewhat narrowly to mostly high-resolution site-based research in archaeology. To truly unleash the capabilities of these techniques, and expand our capacity for wrangling “big” data to more fully investigate past patterns, we need to conduct iterative analyses incorporating remotely sensed data on bounded archaeological sites and regions and unbounded landscapes. A case study from the Late Precontact (ca. A.D. 1200–1600) period in the northern Great Lakes of North America detailing how such an iterative approach can be initiated is explored here.

KEYWORDS:

• Lidar
• Landscape Archaeology
• Great Lakes
• Remote Sensing
• Maximum Entropy
• Food Storage

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the many people who have helped with this research, with especially deep gratitude to Bob Vande Kopple, Kathryn Parker, and Kate Frederick for their instrumental involvement in years of archaeological fieldwork on cache pits. The University of Michigan Biological Station provided critical support and access to data and sites. We thank Parker VanValkenburgh and J. Andrew Dufton for inviting us to participate in this special issue. The material presented here is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No.1659000.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributors

Meghan C. L. Howey (Ph.D. 2006, University of Michigan) is professor and chair of Anthropology and is jointly appointed in the Earth Systems Research Center, Institute for at the Institution for the Study of Earth, Oceans at the University of New Hampshire. She is an anthropological archaeologist specializing in landscape archaeology, geospatial analysis, and interdisciplinary approaches to deep-time coupled human natural systems. As the current James H. Hayes and Claire Short Hayes Professor of the Humanities, Dr. Howey is heading a project entitled “A Deep Time, Multi-Archive Narrative of the Anthropocene in the Great Bay.” In this capacity, she is the Director of the Great Bay Archaeological Survey (GBAS), a community-engaged and interdisciplinary archaeology program working to find and excavate seventeenth century early colonial sites in the Great Bay Estuary, the largest estuary in the Gulf of Maine, northwest Atlantic Ocean.

Franklin B. Sullivan (M.S. 2011, University of New Hampshire) is a research scientist at the Earth Systems Research Center, Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire. His work is in near-Earth remote sensing and spatial data analysis of terrestrial ecosystems using lidar and hyperspectral imaging, with an emphasis on forest structure, and more recently terrain mapping. He is a key member of the Satellite, Airborne, and Drone Lab at UNH and is involved in deploying UASs at multiple field study sites around the globe.

Marieka Brouwer Burg (Ph.D. 2011, Michigan State University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Vermont and an affiliate research faculty at the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Brouwer Burg has conducted research in the Netherlands, Belize, New Mexico, and New Hampshire. She is interested in the effects of landscape evolution and climate change on human communities, as well as reconstructing decision processes and perceptions of landscape in the past. She uses GIS-based archaeological computational modeling to explore these processes in both Old and New World contexts, interweaving indigenous accounts and ontologies through ethnohistoric documents and collaborative techniques. Some of her current research focuses on investigating the spatiotemporal dimensions of ancient Maya land use, mobility and socioeconomic interactions in the central Belize River Valley, Belize.

Michael W. Palace (Ph.D. 2006, University of New Hampshire) is associate professor in Earth Sciences and the Earth Systems Research Center, Institute for at the Institution for the Study of Earth, Oceans at the University of New Hampshire. He is an earth scientist focusing on the terrestrial carbon cycle, vegetation dynamics, landscape ecology, and snow characterization using field measurements, remote sensing, and geospatial science. His research ranges from field studies of vegetation structure to the use of satellite imagery in an effort to predict disease, understand forest dynamics, and find and interpret past human settlement patterns. He has been a Principal Investigator on many major remote sensing projects, with research funding from NASA, NSF, USAID, USDA, USGS, and DOD. He leads the Satellite, Airborne, and Drone Lab at UNH, which is currently deploying UASs at five different field research projects around the globe.