Hello. This is Rachel Boyd, and, for my final project in Intermediate GIS, I will be presenting on the Correlation Between Natural Resources and Archaeological Sites of Pulaski County.
For a long span of time, humans has settled in Southwest Virginia, leaving evidence of their presence in the form of broken material goods and the dead remains buried in the ground. Therefore, as archaeologists, their purpose is to recover the evidence of past cultures found in this region, and attempt to solve the missing piece of the past’s puzzle in hopes to better understand the precise details of how humans came to be today. However, these artifacts would not help an archaeologist’s goal without context of location. Like the realtor’s motto “location, location, location,” the placement of knowing where these sites found are vital for understanding what people in our past were attracted to for settlement, either from hunting and gathering culture through recent 19 century lands. Through observing most archaeological sties and basic knowledge from archaeological courses, humans normally settle near bodies of water, like the New River. According to this information, I suggest that the majority of the sites are close to a source of water, mainly the New River. I will also look if different times periods have any effect on the amount of sites that correlates to a body of water.
My main data source is the Pulaski Sites from the Department of Historical Resources. I went to Dr. Cliff Boyd, an anthropology professor here at Radford University, asking on where to get archaeological data on Pulaski County sites, and he directed and helped me contact the Department of Historical Resources. They gave me not only the data, but also their own version of the results, as shown in this slide. For my own personal base map, however, came from USGS Seamless website, downloading the data of county boarders. To get the New River and other major streams of the area, I retrieved data from the EPA’s website on watersheds. For analysis, I used selection by location to visually show where the clusters of the sites were in Pulaski County, especially by the time period. Also, by using the buffer tool, I was able to find the total amount of current archaeological sites a mile close to the river layer. Spatially, I used General G’s statistical tool to see how likely the clustering was due to the vagaries of sampling.
In my results, 107 out of the total 174 sites in Pulaski County were within a mile radius of the stream sources, showing the majority of the sites clustered around the a source of water, especially the New River.
Next, with the map showing the locations of each time period, one time period did not generally clustered more to the water than the other, going by the ratio of the amount of sites to the time periods, since there are woodland and 19th century than most of the other sites. Also, some of the sites found had an inclusive time period and those are not present in this map
According to the General G and the z-score of 1.7, it is highly unlikely that the cluster patterning found was due to the vagaries of sampling. The 90 percent confidence level is accepted in archaeological data, since the population of the past is never known as data received from present day. Therefore, I was able to reject the null hypothesis that sites were not clustered as shown and found.
In conclusion, the majority of people of various past cultures settled around the New River or other suitable sources of water within the Pulaski County region. This shows that people valued water that provides greatly for multiples needs, like food, water, and transportation. Even today, people gather closer to sources of water, and, by this project, has shown proof that we often follow the past’s footsteps.
