Location Modeling of Final Palaeolithic Sites in Northern Germany

Abstract

Location modeling, both inductive and deductive, is widely used in archaeology to predict or investigate the spatial distribution of sites. The commonality among these approaches is their consideration of only spatial effects of the first order (i.e., the interaction of the locations with the site characteristics). Second-order effects (i.e., the interaction of locations with each other) are rarely considered. We introduce a deductive approach to investigating such second-order effects using linguistic hypotheses about settling behavior in the Final Palaeolithic. A Poisson process was used to simulate a point distribution using expert knowledge of two distinct hunter–gatherer groups, namely, reindeer hunters and elk hunters. The modeled points and point densities were compared with the actual finds. The G-, F-, and K-function, which allow for the identification of second-order effects of varying intensity for different periods, were applied. The results reveal differences between the two investigated groups, with the reindeer hunters showing location-related interaction patterns, indicating a spatial memory of the preferred locations over an extended period of time. Overall, this paper shows that second-order effects occur in the geographical modeling of archaeological finds and should be taken into account by using approaches such as the one presented in this paper.

Integrating Point Process Models, Evolutionary Ecology and Traditional Knowledge Improves Landscape Archaeology—A Case from Southwest Madagascar

“…This is critical particularly in areas where archaeological investigation is still nascent. While the use of PPMs in archaeology as explanatory tools has increased in recent years [17,19,[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], they are still relatively underutilized and few studies have explicitly used them for predictive modeling of site distributions [32].…”

Pioneers in a changing world – investigating the elusive settlement and mobility patterns of north European hunter-gather groups from the end of the last Ice Age

“…Evidently, prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups surviving the arctic or subarctic conditions of the late Weichselian Ice Age must have been strongly dependent on the natural environment. Considering the environmental conditions and the marked seasonal variation in climate, flora, and fauna -we also must assume that mobility and settlement strategies may have been quite complex at the time (Eriksen 2002;Hamer et al 2019). Thus, a broad geographic approach is crucial to our understanding of these aspects.…”

Scales of transformations—Modelling settlement and land-use dynamics in late antique and early medieval Basel, Switzerland

“…Building on the discharge estimation, the annual run-off is used as coefficient that includes climatic parameters such as precipitation, snow-melt regime in the catchment, and water storage capacity of the aquifer. Similar approaches have recently been developed for example by Hamer and Knitter (2018), who used fuzzy approaches to estimate land-use and location patterns in different areas and chronological periods [ 13 , 121 – 123 ]. For Basel, the above-mentioned parameters were incorporated as raster data into the model and the distance of each cell to the closest river system was calculated using QGIS.…”