Thursday, August 7, 2014

GIS 5103 Participation Post #2: Viewshed Analysis in Archaeological Modeling





In their 2014 article "A house with a view? Multi-modal inference, visibility fields, and point process analysis of a Bronze Age settlement on Leskernick Hill (Cornwall, UK)" (2014, Journal of Archaeological Science 43, 267-277), Stuart Eve and Enrico Crema describe their efforts to model Bronze Age sites using different sets of variables and critique the way in which some researchers approach statistical modelling.  Modelling, as the authors use the term, involves performing spatial analyses on variables that potentially affected site placement; a successful model would reveal correlations between variable values and site placement.  For example, a model might propose that sites are more likely to be located at certain elevations or in areas of a certain level of precipitation.  Environmental variables such as elevation, slope, aspect, land cover, rainfall, and distance to permanent water sources are all common variables to consider when constructing a model for analysis.  Eve and Crema emphasize that no model is "true"; there are only more or less successful models.  Even a successful model, showing strong statistical correlation between variables and site placement, is not guaranteed to be closer to true than other models.  A wide range of variables and different levels of analyses must be considered.

Eve and Crema investigate three proposed models for the location of sites on Leskernick Hill.  The two models unique to their study involve line of sight analyses.  The first model proposed the placement of sites to maintain line of sight with ritual sites in the area while the second proposed a line of sight preference for tin deposits.  The third model looked at the more standard topographic and environmental variables.  The line of sight analyses were created by calculating the viewshed of every raster cell coinciding with Leskernick Hill using GRASS GIS and Python for batch processing.


The results indicate the need to consider difference scales of analyses.  While the first model (line of sight with ritual sites) was the best match overall, sites in the western portion of the study area fit the second model (line of sight to tin resource) much better.  Removing these western sites also showed the southern sites fit the first model even better.  The topographic inputs of the third model did not fit site location very well.

Link to article (hopefully one that works this time):

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