Imagine the potential impact of climate change, specifically sea level rise and storm surges along the coast of Georgia.
Encroachment of sea water could destroy archaeological sites that give insight into human activities, history and cultural expression.
Matt Howland
Matt Howland, assistant professor of anthropology and archaeology, is using Geographic Information Systems software to model how such coastal change and damage could occur. GIS is used to record, store, analyze, visualize, and interpret geographic data, and has become an important technological tool for archaeologists, particularly in determining changes across landscapes.
“You can model a slow, steady process of sea level rise along the coast, what impact that will have spatially along the whole coast, and what archaeological sites it will impact,” Howland said.
More than 4,000 archaeological sites on the Georgia coast are at risk for being potentially destroyed or damaged by storm surges if a dramatic hurricane were to hit the coast, Howland said.
“That kind of analysis is all done through GIS because GIS is our way of interpreting how these things that we think about, like storm surge and sea level rise, have a spatial impact across the landscape,” Howland said. “It’s only possible to study what archaeological sites would be impacted through the use of GIS, basically because it gives us that spatial calculator.”
Howland has used new forms of technology in his archaeological work over the years. His recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences outlines his work as a postdoc using archaeomagnetic techniques to study the ancient conditions of Earth’s magnetic field, and was picked up by news outlets CNN and VICE for its significant finding. Testing date-inscribed ancient bricks, Howland’s team discovered a previously unknown surge in the Earth’s magnetic field that occurred in Mesopotamia (now modern-day Iraq) during the time of King Nebuchadnezzar. In this research, Howland also used GIS to map the locations of both old and new magnetic samples that contributed to these findings.
What can’t be done with GIS
GIS is not without its limitations, though. One is that it doesn’t allow for the ability to plot change over time in one location—the vertical aspect of archaeology. The more problematic limitation, according to Howland, is that we live in a 3-D world, but GIS is two dimensional.
“GIS is a 2-D representation of the world, so there's a fundamental simplification of what we are looking at in terms of how people interact with space and a 3-dimensional sense when you look at it on a 2-dimensional computer screen.”
Additionally, GIS provides a top-down perspective, sometimes called “God’s eye” view, Howland said.
“Every space is kind of considered equally. It’s an absolute perspective of space,” he said. “When people interact with space, they don’t deal with it equally in that way. We as humans think about space in terms of key landmarks that are taking on this kind of disproportionate importance in the landscape.”
Research in Kansas
Although Howland’s most recent project studies the Georgia coastline, he sees applications for research in Kansas that may include reconstructing the pathways that rivers have taken and thinking about how the landscape has changed over time spatially.
“My goal is to apply for funding that will allow me to use satellite imagery to predict and model risks to archaeological sites based on factors like river-based erosion that could cut into the banks of archaeological sites,” Howland said, “and also industrial agriculture and mechanized tilling, which has a huge impact on destroying archaeological sites across the US and especially in Kansas.”