GIS Based Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences - Chpater 13

13 Site-Catchment Analysis of Prehistoric Settlements by Reconstructing Paleoenvironments with GIS Hiro’omi Tsumura CONTENTS 13.1 A Brief Review of Spatial Archaeology .................................................175 13.2 The Sannai-Maruyama Archaeological Project.....................................177 13.3 Present Nature of the Area Surrounding the Sannai-Maruyama Archaeological Site....................................................................................177 13.4 Construction of a Spatio-Temporal GIS Database ...............................179 13.5 Reconstruction of the Paleosynecology .................................................182 13.6 Site-Catchment Analysis of the Reconstructed Paleoenvironment.........183 13.7 Beyond Spatial Archaeology....................................................................188 Achnowledgments..............................................................................................189 References.............................................................................................................189 13.1 A Brief Review of Spatial Archaeology In archaeology, methods for reconstructing prehistoric settlements have been discussed from various viewpoints. Until the 1970s, “Marxist or Darwinist” archaeologists (Dark, 1995) commonly emphasized the importance of the socio-economic contexts of prehistoric societies. However, after the 1980s, many Western archaeologists questioned these approaches. As alternatives, “new” or “process” archaeology (Dark, 1995) emerged, emphasizing a “human–nature interaction”; that is to say, settlements were considered to have originated through the interaction between human behavior and the environment. Along with this stream of thought, Hodder and Orton (1976), Clarke (1977), and others developed spatial archaeology, which emphasized the importance 175 Copyright © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 176 GIS-based Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences of spatial attributes in archaeological information. In the early stages of its development, archaeologists encountered difficulty in treating such spatial attributes. In the 1990s, however, this problem was significantly overcome through the introduction of geographical information systems (GIS), which were developed together with rapid progress in the refinement of personal computers and spatial-information science (e.g., Allen, Green, and Zubrow, 1990; Lock and Stancic, 1995; Kaneda, Tsumura, and Niiro, 2001). Since GIS enabled the systematic integration of archaeological, geograph-ical, and environmental information, those archaeologists who were inter-ested in prehistoric settlements began applying GIS to field research and theoretical studies. For example, Gaffney and Stancic (1991) chose the island of Hvar in Croatia as a pilot-study area, and carried out comparative studies concerning the “human–nature interaction” upon Roman settle-ments. Their approach took joint account of human material culture and natural landscape factors, and they disentangled the complicated mecha-nisms of “human–natural interactions” by using GIS. In the 2000s, GIS archaeologists began to develop several new perspec-tives. For instance, Spikins (2000), Tsumura (2001), Indruszewski (2002), Ceccarelli and Niccolucci (2003), Clevis et al. (2004), and others considered that paleolandscape reconstruction was indispensable in order to under-stand the dynamics of human ecology. Kamermans (2000), Verhagen and Berger (2001), Doortje (2003), and others proposed predictive modeling and simulation of the paleoenvironment, expecting that it would overcome the limitations of inductive approaches. Crescioli, D’Andrea and Niccolucci (2000), Hatzinikolaou et al. (2003), and others attempted an integrated approach using fuzzy logic that may clarify errors within a deterministic interpretation. Reynoso and Castro (2004), Reynoso and Jezierski (2002), and others adopted the chaos theory and simulation methods in an attempt to establish a deductive method for explaining prehistoric phenomena. In this chapter, we illustrate GIS-based methods for reconstructing the paleoenvironment that has been developed in the Sannai-Maruyama site archaeological project. This project was the first large-scale project carried out in Japan with the aim of understanding the “human–nature interaction” concept history. The chapter consists of seven sections, starting with this review. Section 13.2 outlines the Sannai-Maruyama project, and Section 13.3 describes the modern environment of the area surrounding the Sannai-Maruyama site. Section 13.4 discusses the construction of the spatio-tem-poral database used for the project. Section 13.5 attempts, through analog-ical inference from geological data and the present ecological environment, to reconstruct the paleoenvironment of the Sannai-Maruyama settlement, which lasted for 1700 years about 5000 years ago. Based on this reconstruc-tion, Section 13.6 attempts to determine the catchment area of the Sannai-Maruyama settlement and looks at the distinctive characteristics of the Sannai-Maruyama site when it is compared with a similar site. The last section summarizes the analytical methods and the major results derived from the project. Copyright © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Site-Catchment Analysis of Prehistoric Settlement 177 13.2 The Sannai-Maruyama Archaeological Project The Sannai-Maruyama site, which was designated as a special national his-torical site in November 2000, was settled from the early to late stages of the Jomon period, a Japanese Mesolithic culture. Many archaeological artifacts, including a great quantity of Jomon pottery, stone lithic articles and orna-ments, clay figurines, pit dwellings, storage chambers, clay-mining pits, and graves, were unearthed during excavations carried out since 1992. Radiocar-bon dating showed that people lived at this site for 1700 years between 5900 to 4200 B.P. The nature of the settlement that can be discerned following excavation at this site is different in two respects from that which archaeol-ogists imagined before excavation. First, the number of dwellings in a typical prehistoric village is considerably larger than we imagined. We had consid-ered that 5–10 houses, with 20–50 inhabitants would be normal. However, 50 to 100 houses were discovered to represent one archaeological phase, suggesting that 200–400 people lived together. Second, the life span of the villages in the site was much longer than we originally thought. Most were generally maintained for one to three generations, or 50–100 years. People lived at the Sannai-Maruyama site for 1700 years continuously. Maintaining such a large-scale settlement must have been difficult for a Mesolithic society whose survival basis was subsistence hunting and gathering. The following questions arise: What kind of subsistence strategies supported the size and duration of the Sannai-Maruyama site? What kind of environmental factors allowed the people to live with such a lifestyle? To answer these questions, interdisciplinary studies were undertaken in collaboration with researchers in ecology, geology, geography, zoology, biol-ogy, and, of course, archaeology. GIS played a key role in integrating these many types of data. 13.3 Present Nature of the Area Surrounding the Sannai-Maruyama Archaeological Site To appreciate the location and environmental characteristics of the Sannai-Maruyama archaeological site and the surrounding area where the prehis-toric Sannai-Maruyama people lived, the current environment is examined. The study area (the rectangular area in Figure 13.1b) is in the northern part of Honshu, the main island in Japan (Figure 13.1a). The area measures Copyright © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 178 GIS-based Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Honshu a b N Units 10000.00 FIGURE 13.1 The archaeological site distribution map on DEM. about 2880 square kilometres, and contains some 700 archaeological sites from the Jomon period (see Figures 13.1 and 13.2). The Sannai-Maruyama site is located on what is now diluvial upland, with an altitude of 10–20 m. This upland is formed upon a bedrock of pyroclastic material typified by volcanic ash, which has been eroded into an undulating topography. This upland and the Aomori Plain are separated by the Nyunai Fault (Figure 13.2). The Okidate River (Figure 13.2) flows from the border of the Sannai-Maruyama site into the Aomori Bay. The geomorphic features of the east of the Aomori Plain differ from the west because the Komagome and Nonai rivers (Figure 13.2), which flow through the piedmont alluvial plain of Hakkouda, provide a large quantity of volcanically derived sedi-ment to the Aomori Plain, which has created several alluvial fans on the east. The vegetation of the uplands and hills surrounding the Aomori Plain consists of oak (Quercus crispula) or planted forest of evergreen conifers. This oak is thought to be second-growth forest following a massive deforestation of Japanese beech (Fagus crenata). In addition to Sannai-Maruyama, we examined one further locality (which will be referred to in Section 13.6). This comparison widens our perspective and clarifies some distinctive characteristics of the Sannai-Maruyama site. Copyright © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Site-Catchment Analysis of Prehistoric Settlement 179 Aomori bay Nonai river Aomori plain Sannai-Maruyama Archaeological site Okidate river Komagome river Nyunai fault The hole-core or logging data point N Units 3000.00 FIGURE 13.2 The hole-core distribution map and geomorphic features on the Aomori plain. 13.4 Construction of a Spatio-Temporal GIS Database The archaeological database consists of many data sets. The first such set includes the geographical, geological, and geomorphological data of the Sannai-Maruyama Mesolithic site and its surroundings. It includes rivers (lines), soils (polygons), and climatic zones (polygons). For comparisons, the first data set includes observations on other sites and surroundings. The first data set is the base map for the second data set. The second data set consists of archaeological survey information, includ-ing the boundaries of sites (polygons) and the spatial distribution of pottery, stone artifacts, dwellings, and other remains. These data were recorded with their locations, but we often met the following difficulties. The boundary detail was obtained by digitizing site areas recorded on paper maps. Considerable difficulty arises when the boundaries are super-imposed on the GIS geographical-coordinate system, because almost all paper maps of archaeological sites employ arbitrary coordinates. Old maps of sites were recorded on handwritten memos or they used local surveys that were independent of the standard geographical-coordinate system. Although control points were recorded, these did not relate to formal refer-ence points. The location data or addresses of sites were not always recorded because many of the paper maps were without textual data. Moreover, plural Copyright © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ... - tailieumienphi.vn