![]() ![]() We could test this hypothesis by comparing the areas occupied in the two periods with respect to elevation and slope. We might hypothesize, for instance, that the Roman colonization of the area was based on cereal agriculture production for export, and that as a result Gallo-Roman period settlement would have prioritized relatively low, flat land appropriate for such activity. Using a fictionalized dataset for a small area in Provence, we’ll take a look at some tools for exploring spatial data, and show that the areas settled in the Early Iron Age and the Gallo-Roman Period were significantly distinct with respect to some variables, but similar in others. For simplicity we’ll use a DEM and rasters of slope and aspect that we can derive from it, but any other raster data could also be employed. Here we’ll take a slightly more robust approach that looks at the areas around sites rather than their precise locations, calculating a buffer around each site location and then averaging the values of multiple environmental variables within those buffers. It’s common to do this by calculating values for the point locations in a shapefile of sites, and often of interest to compare environmental variables across some aspect of site variability - function, time period, size, etc. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |