Modeling multivariate landscape affordances and functional ecosystem connectivity in landscape archeology

Abstract

Quantitative, digital statistics, and spatial analysis have proven to be useful tools in landscape archeological research. Herein, GIS-based data storage, manipulation, and visualization of environmental attributes and archeological records are among the most intensely applied methods to evaluate human-landscape interaction, movement patterns, and spatial behavior of past societies. Recent land use management and land cover change, however, have largely altered and modified present-day landscapes, which decreases the potential replicability of modern surface conditions to past ecosystem functionalities and the individual human landscape affordances. This article presents a comprehensive multivariate environmental analysis from a regional case study in the Upper Rhine Valley and exemplifies the bias of the archeological record based on modern land use, built-up, and surface change. Two major conclusions can be drawn: modern surfaces are the result of long-term past human landscape development, and the archeological data inherent in the landscape is strongly biased by modern human activity ranges, urban, agricultural and infrastructural development, and the configuration and perception of recent surface management.

From landscape affordances to landscape connectivity: contextualizing an archaeology of human ecology

“…This section discusses potential directions in landscape archaeology and offers a new approach to understand the human-landscape interaction. A supraregional case study that takes up on these considerations has recently been published by the author of this article (Kempf 2020).…”

“…As recently stressed by the author, the available data is highly biased by the construction activities of modern society (Kempf 2020). This has produced rich archaeological information.…”

“…Reconstructing past environmental conditions using modern datasets is a critical approach (Dincauze 2000). Modern data is heavily biased not only by past environmental variability but also by the conceptual framework of our current society (Kempf 2020). Certain landscape perspectives appear to be a product of long-lasting natural development.…”

“…Very basically speaking, this means that people gain information from the experience of other people (Gramsch 1996;Scarantino 2003). In a geoarchaeological context, this enables the possibility of interpolating affordances from multivariate landscape analyses (Kempf 2019(Kempf , 2020.…”

“…As pointed out by the author for the Upper Rhine Valley, various environmental parameters and modern surface transformations bias the distribution and the perception of the archaeological record (Kempf 2020). In most cases, the actual bias is a composition of interdependencies of natural preconditions (e.g.…”