1st Edition

Computational Approaches to Archaeological Spaces

Edited By Andrew Bevan, Mark Lake Copyright 2013
    330 Pages
    by Routledge

    330 Pages
    by Routledge

    This volume of original chapters written by experts in the field offers a snapshot of how historical built spaces, past cultural landscapes, and archaeological distributions are currently being explored through computational social science. It focuses on the continuing importance of spatial and spatio-temporal pattern recognition in the archaeological record, considers more wholly model-based approaches that fix ideas and build theory, and addresses those applications where situated human experience and perception are a core interest. Reflecting the changes in computational technology over the past decade, the authors bring in examples from historic and prehistoric sites in Europe, Asia, and the Americas to demonstrate the variety of applications available to the contemporary researcher.

    List of Illustrations
    Acknowledgments

    1. Introduction,Andrew Bevan and Mark Lake
    2. Intensities, Interactions and Uncertainties: Some New Approaches to Archaeological Distributions, Andrew Bevan, Enrico Crema, Xiuzhen Li and Alessio Palmisano
    3. An Examination of Automated Archaeological Feature Recognition in Remotely Sensed Imagery, Kenneth Kvamme
    4. An Introduction to Integrative Distance Analysis (IDA), Terence Clarke
    5. Network Models and Archaeological Spaces, Ray Rivers, Carl Knappett, and Timothy Evans
    6. Multilevel Selection and the Evolution of Food Sharing in Fragmented Environments: A Spatially Explicit Model and its Implications for Early Stone Age Archaeology, L.S. Premo
    7. Stories of the Past or Science of the Future? Archaeology and Computational Social Science, Michael Barton
    8. The Potential and Limits of Optimal Path Analysis, Irmela Herzog
    9. Compute-Intensive GIS Visibility Analysis of the Settings of Prehistoric Stone Circles, Mark Lake and Damon Ortega
    10. Reconsidering the Concept of Visualscape: Recent Advances in Three-Dimensional Visibility Analysis, Eleftheria Paliou
    11. Formal and Informal Analysis of Rendered Space: The Basilica Portuense, Graeme Earl, Vito Porcelli, Constantinos Papadopoulos, Gareth Beale, Matthew Harrison, Hembo Pagi and Simon Keay
    12. Reproducible Data Analysis and the Open Source Paradigm in Archaeology, Benjamin Ducke

    Index
    About the Editors/Contributors

    Biography

    Andrew Bevan, Mark Lake

    “The papers in this edited volume, which grew out of a 2010 University College London international archaeology seminar, are organized around three broad themes: spatial analysis, spatial modeling, and spatial experience. Roughly one-third of the book is devoted to each topic. The first set of three papers represents inductive, exploratory approaches to archaeological spatial analysis. The second set comprises four chapters offering more deductive and model-driven approaches. These first seven chapters of the book are the most interesting and, arguably, the most useful to the majority of analysts. The final set of three articles concerns the analysis of viewsheds, visualscapes, and 3D architectural models....
    Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty/professionals.”

    —CHOICE