Predictive Modeling

Survey and excavations are both time consuming and expensive. A common problem that every archaeologist faces is where to look? Entire seasons of excavation can be wasted by digging in the wrong place, and surveying takes weeks and months. GIS provides the powerful ability of predictive modeling. This is one of the most popular applications of GIS among archaeologists, and can save both time and money for researchers. Predictive modeling works by looking at established sites and their relationships to the surrounding environment. One assumes that a type of society would choose a place to settle down in the same fashion. This means that archaeologists assume that a society chose a landscape that was most favorable to them. Examples would include the proximity to a water source and elevated ground that could be easily defended. GIS can analyze that spatial relationships of known sites and their surrounding landscapes, and use this relationship to search for new sites by finding spots with similar sort of surroundings. Dann and Yerkes explain the concept as, "Most archaeological [predictive] models have noted the correlations between natural landscape features and site locations, suggesting that ancient people selected specific types of terrain, soils, and elevations for their settlements and activity areas." (14)

Dann and Yerkes used predictive modeling to find more Frankish settlements in the Corinth area of Greece. (14) Common features around known Frankish sites such as soil types, slopes of the landscapes, water sources, and ancient roadways were identified. GIS then searched for these common features on the entire region in order to identify other Frankish sites. The concept of predictive modeling is simple, although the process would be quite difficult without GIS. GIS can look for unidentified sites by trying to match various environmental factors of known archaeological sites with landscapes of a different region.