Conditional GIS surfaces and their potential for archaeological predictive modelling

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Abstract

Conditional GIS surfaces are well known in archaeological applications. Perhaps the most familiar of these are visibility analyses and friction layers (the basis of cost distance evaluations). Archaeological studies however tend to limit the use of such surfaces to purely environmental variables with little explanatory or analytical power. Friction, for example, is usually constructed entirely from a generated slope surface, occasionally with the addition of some physical barriers (such as waterways or perhaps vegetation differences). There are as well, a multitude of potential “conditions” to place upon spatial parameters which include strongly cultural ideas about knowledge, perception, familiarity, territoriality, risk, and other kinds of cognitive behaviours. Here we explore the kinds of “conditions” which could provide a great deal of explanatory or analytical understanding to our GIS archaeological applications, to categorize them into a meaningful framework, and to provide examples from a recent predictive model of how such surfaces can be applied.