Recent years have seen the rapid expansion of airborne and spaceborne remote-sensing products adopted by archaeologists for interpreting ancient landscapes and managing heritage resources. A growing and increasingly specialized literature attests to the promise and availability of commercial and publicly funded satellite imagery, as well as UAV-mounted sensors across a range of resolutions and price points. In the South Caucasus (including the countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia), a growing commitment to landscape approaches in archaeology is stimulating the adoption of satellite remote sensing as an important new tool for identifying and managing archaeological resources while tracing the impact of historic land-use alterations in survey areas. Nevertheless, budgetary challenges and a lack of training opportunities among international partners and heritage organizations outside of the funding streams of large academic institutions can lead to widening technological gulfs in the discipline that reinforce colonial relationships. Building on recent technical articles covering specific imagery datasets, this article aims to address this by providing a general review of free or low-cost remotely sensed datasets available to archaeologists, with the aim of broadening awareness of these important tools and their vocabularies, and illustrating them with recent published examples from the South Caucasus.

Despite advocacy of landscape approaches in cultural resource management (CRM) and critiques of the site concept, CRM data collection methods in the western United States continue to focus on individual archaeological sites as units of observation, analysis, and management. The transect-recording unit (TRU) method strikes a balance between conventional site-based recording methods and site-less survey approaches by dividing survey space into a grid of uniformly sized cells for recording all cultural manifestations observed across a survey area. TRU survey generates site boundaries required by CRM regulations while retaining a fine-grained spatial framework for landscape-level research and management. This article discusses the technical requirements of the TRU system and its potential for improving landscape-level research and management. Advances in digital recording technologies and analysis techniques render the method efficient and effective in identifying cultural resource distributions and characteristics otherwise obscured by conventional approaches. The research and management potential of the TRU system is illustrated through identification and interpretation of precontact foot trails in New Mexico's Tularosa Basin. These trails are essentially invisible during pedestrian survey but are readily identifiable as linear patterns using aggregated landscape-scale TRU survey data from multiple survey projects, providing novel insight into precontact routes of movement and exchange.

This article reports the material evidence of roads in the northwestern Maya Lowlands that were in use from the Middle Preclassic (800–300 BC) through the Late Classic (AD 700–900) period in Chiapas and Tabasco, Mexico. The study includes archaeological evidence recovered from field research in an area covering approximately 670 km2 and 618 recorded archaeological sites. It presents the physical characteristics of a series of piedmont paths that connected the region from the Usumacinta River to the Tulijá River, including large population centers such as Palenque and Chinikihá. The study uses a geographic information system (GIS) least cost path (LCP) analysis to identify the location of roads and how they relate to regional settlement patterns. It also tests the use of modern computational models to advance regional studies in the Maya area. Study results show how the Classic Maya adapted and appropriated the region's topography to facilitate movement, long-term settlement, and the building of landesque capital.

In the last decade, archaeologists have been using human-occupied interactive digital built environments to investigate human agency, settlement, and behavior. To document this evidence, we provide here one method of conducting drone-based photogrammetry and GIS mapping from within these digital spaces based on well-established methods conducted in physical landscapes. Mapping is an integral part of archaeology in the natural world, but it has largely eluded researchers in these new, populated digital landscapes. We hope that our proposed method helps to resolve this issue. We argue that employing archaeological methods in digital environments provides a successful methodological framework to investigate human agency in digital spaces for anthropological purposes and has the potential for extrapolating data from human-digital landscape interactions and applying them to their natural analogues.

In recent years, digital technologies applied to archaeology have led to considerable changes in fieldwork. However, the use of mobile GIS for fieldwork has not been widespread, especially in countries where GIS is not yet entrenched within the field of archaeology. Over the last decade, the technological context associated with mobile GIS has changed. In this text, these changes are discussed based on a case study developed in Catamarca (Argentina), in which the possibilities of a more generalized use of mobile GIS—based on free, open, and available resources (software, data, devices)–are discussed. This article assesses the main problems faced and describes the basic steps taken to implement a field recording system based on mobile GIS.

The places in which people live and spend time are steeped in history, memory, and meaning from the intersection of daily life, environmental interactions, cultural practices, and ritual. Geologic features, plants, animals, and ecosystems merge with these cultural histories, forming critical parts of the landscape and areas of “high cultural salience,” or “cultural keystone places” (CKPs). We identify Kumqaq’ (Point Conception) and the surrounding area in California as a Chumash CKP. Ethnohistoric accounts and contemporary Chumash community members have long demonstrated the importance of Point Conception in Chumash worldview and identity, whereas biologists, ecologists, and conservationists reference the area's rich biodiversity and significance as a biogeographical boundary. Recent archaeological survey of the coastline surrounding Kumqaq’ highlights these connections, identifying over 50 archaeological sites—including shell middens, villages, lithic scatters, and rock art—with at least 9,000 years of occupation. Ongoing collaborations among archaeologists, the Nature Conservancy, and Chumash community members help document and understand the long-term linkages between cultural and biological diversity and how integrating these perspectives can help ensure the resilience of this nexus of human and natural history in the Anthropocene future.

Genetic and linguistic evidence suggests that, after living in the Subarctic for thousands of years, Northern Athabascans began migrating to the American Southwest around 1,000 years ago. Anthropologists have proposed that this partial out-migration and several associated in situ behavioral changes were the result of a massive volcanic eruption that decimated regional caribou herds. However, regional populations appear to increase around the time of these changes, a demographic shift that may have led to increased territoriality, resource stress, and specialization. Building on existing syntheses of cultural dynamics in the region, analyses of excavated materials, and landscape data from Alaska and Yukon, this research shows that the Athabascan transition represented a gradual shift toward resource specialization in both salmon and caribou with an overall increase in diet breadth, indicating a behavioral transition that is more consistent with gradual demographic change. Further, this behavioral shift was already in motion at the time of the volcanic eruption circa 1150 cal BP and suggests that the ultimate migration from the area was the result of demographic pressures. In sum, this research elaborates on the complex dynamics of resilience and adaptation in hunter-gatherer groups and provides a testable model for explaining past migrations.

A new theoretical model is proposed for the definition of social structure and processes of change of the Castro Culture societies. It is based on current anthropological approaches to ‘agrarian segmentary societies’ and implies the revision of the aristocratic models that now dominate research on the European Iron Age.