Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Emergence of Settlement Patterns

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La Playa is an important archaeological site where archaeologists have found hundreds of artifacts and features from over millenia of human occupation. It features an extensive canal system, hundreds of burials, agricultural fields, subterranean ovens called hornos, production areas for shell jewelry, and many other archaeological components. During occupation people became more sedentary as they developed agriculture and canal systems. In a following period, pottery appeared, and the importance of agriculture increased. Archaeologists do not fully understand the cause and nature of this transition, which will be researched by this project. This transnational research will build on international cooperation between archaeologists. Investigators will address two research questions, one about site formation processes and another about how settlement patterns changed. How has erosion impacted the site? How did domestic settlement patterns, environmental modifications, and other uses of space change? These questions are answerable through Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis of features and artifacts, modelling erosion processes, and the remote sensing of large-scale agricultural features. Archaeologists have conducted research at the site for over 20 years. These investigations have produced a large sample of data, which has not yet been analyzed in GIS. This research will examine changes in the cultural landscape through a comprehensive spatial analysis of the features and artifacts recorded and analyzed to date in addition to using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle to map the site topography and a magnetometer to search for additional buried pithouses, canals, and other features.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.