This week in Special Topics in Archaeology, we had a pretty interesting lab exercise. We started with a digital elevation model of the Tangle Lakes Archaeological District in Alaska and some hydrographic information (mostly about the streams and ice mass). From this raster and features, we were able to create additional raster that indicated favorable slope (for living areas), favorable access to sunlight (more south facing), elevations below the ice mass (warmer), and areas that were within 0.5 miles of a water source (one of the many streams).
With all this information, we could combine all the rasters using a weighting for each into a single weighted overlay (above). This map shows the areas that are most likely to be inhabited in green and least likely in red. While this was a pretty simple view of this study area, it was a good demonstration of the tools we need to conduct a similar study in the regions of our own archaeological study.
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