Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Emergence of Settlement Patterns

拉普拉亚是一个重要的考古遗址，考古学家在那里发现了数千年来人类居住的数百件文物和特征。它以广阔的运河系统、数百个墓葬、农田、称为hornos的地下烤炉、贝壳首饰生产区和许多其他考古成分为特色。在占领期间，随着农业和运河系统的发展，人们变得更加定居。在接下来的一段时期，陶器出现了，农业的重要性增加了。考古学家并不完全了解这种转变的原因和性质，这将由本项目进行研究。这项跨国研究将建立在考古学家之间的国际合作基础上。调查人员将解决两个研究问题，一个是关于遗址形成过程，另一个是关于聚落模式如何变化。侵蚀对遗址有何影响？国内定居模式、环境变化和其他空间利用是如何变化的？这些问题可以通过地理信息系统（GIS）对特征和人工制品的分析、侵蚀过程的建模以及大规模农业特征的遥感来回答。考古学家在这个遗址进行了20多年的研究。这些调查产生了大量数据样本，这些数据尚未在GIS中进行分析。这项研究将通过对迄今为止记录和分析的特征和文物进行全面的空间分析，以及使用无人驾驶飞行器绘制遗址地形图，并使用磁力计搜索其他埋藏的碉堡、运河和其他特征，来检查文化景观的变化。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.