GIS Applications in Archaeology: Final Project

     The last module for this course is the final project. We were given two choices. The first option was to perform a catchment analysis on the Oaxaca Valley data from earlier in the semester (Module 6). The second option was to generate your own research project. While the Oaxaca catchment analysis would have been enlightening, it is South American archaeology. As I currently hold a seasonal position with the Forest Service, I thought it would be more relevant to my career path to choose a North American archaeology topic. With that in mind I decided to look at coastal erosion and archaeology along the coast of Apalachicola. The study area is shown in Map 1 below.
     The aim of my project was to use GIS to generate a list of sites that could potentially be threatened by coastal erosion due to their proximity to stretches of coast that experience high rates of coastal erosion. The Select by Location tool was integral to my analysis. With it I was able to find sites within a certain distance from erosion (distance determined by rates of erosion in each county examined), see Map 2 below. From this set of  sites I was able to identify those that were outside of conservation lands. I think that this makes them more susceptible to the effects of erosion as they may not be monitored as frequently as those that are managed in public land.

Map 1. A map of the study area showing the three Apalachicola
coastal counties analyzed - Gulf, Franklin, and Wakulla.

Map 2. A map showing all of the archaeological sites that lie along areas of the
coast that are impacted by high or very high erosion rates.

Map 3. A map showing protected, conservation lands and those archaeological
sites that lie outside 

I found 15 sites that require monitoring as they lie outside of public land. They are presumably more threatened than those sites that lie within conservation lands (assuming sites in these protected areas are monitored regularly). Fifty two sites in total were identified as being proximal to and likely to be impacted by erosion. Future studies would refine this research and look to generating a cultural resource vulnerability index to sites as was done by Reeder et al (2012).

Links to data sources:
USGS
ARROW
FGDL

Literature Cited
Reeder, Leslie A., Torben C. Rick, and Jon M. Erlandson
     2012 Our disappearing past: A GIS analysis of the vulnerability of coastal archaeological  
         resources in the Santa Barbara Channel Islands. J Coast Conserv 16:187-197