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Analyzing the Chacoan Road Network with Sean Field - Ep 117
215 Plays5 years ago
Researcher Sean Field joins us to talk about his work performing a least cost analysis on the Chacoan Road Network in New Mexico. The Chaco roads are somewhat of a mystery because of their size. Sean talks about his work and recent paper with Paul and Chris.
Links
App of the Day
- Webby: Public Lands from Two Steps Beyond
- Paul: Just 6 Weeks
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Sponsor Announcement
00:00:00
Speaker
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00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome
Episode Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:20
Speaker
to the archaeotech podcast, episode 117. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk to Sean Field of Notre Dame about his research into the Choco and Road network.
Sean Field's Research Focus
00:00:31
Speaker
Let's get to it.
00:00:34
Speaker
All right, as I said in the introduction, we are interviewing Sean Field. He is a doctoral student at the University of Notre Dame. Sean is a geospatial archeologist that focuses on Chaco and Mesa Verde regions of the American Southwest. His research interests include interaction, settlement, and climate variability.
Thanksgiving Conversation
00:00:51
Speaker
The paper we'll be discussing is linked in the show notes and it's called a Least Cost Analysis Correlative Modeling of the Chaco Regional Road System. And again, you can find that link in the show notes.
00:01:03
Speaker
All right, welcome to the show, everybody. And Paul, how are you doing on this Thanksgiving Day? Oh, I'm doing pretty good. How are you doing today? Stuffed yet? Good. Good. I know. I know. I know. It's actually kind of funny talking about that because I'm going to pull the curtain back a little bit. We're recording a week and a half before Thanksgiving. I am stuffed. But I am. But I'm also stuffed. Yeah. Well, I'm practicing.
00:01:24
Speaker
Nice. Well, hopefully everyone is, uh, is enjoying family time. Chances are, if you're listening to this on Thanksgiving day, you're, you're sick of family and you're listening to our podcast instead, but we'll hope that, uh, hope that it all works out. All right. So we have a fantastic guest today. Uh, his name is Sean field, as I read in the bio and the introduction. So Sean, welcome to the show. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Experiences near Chaco Canyon
00:01:48
Speaker
Great. Uh, you brought my memory back, you know, cause we're going to talk about Chaco Canyon and the, and the Chaco road system and, uh, and go down some, go down some areas like that. But man, I saw, I got a chance to work near Chaco Canyon on a serum project probably five, six years ago and, or more, more than that.
00:02:06
Speaker
Yeah, we were actually staying in this like branch townhouse. We weren't working anywhere with the Chaco Canyon stuff, but it could have been a Chaco and outlier, I guess. But then
Discussion on Chaco Roads
00:02:16
Speaker
during our days off, my wife and I, we would just like for the first, I think three or four sessions of days off, we just went to Chaco Canyon and did some of the hikes up to like Pueblo Bonito, Pueblo Alto, of course, Pueblo Pinasco Blanca, I think it's called. Yeah, Pinasco Blanca.
00:02:32
Speaker
that's a great yeah isn't it though saw the supernova petroglyph and all that are pictograph and uh it was just a good time so thanks for thanks for bringing all that back yeah no problem glad i can help yeah so why don't you just give us a give
Purpose and Use of Chaco Roads in Archaeology
00:02:48
Speaker
us an overview of what we're going to talk about here what you were studying over at chaco canyon then we'll go from there yeah so chaco roads are really like an integral part of whatever we're talking about when we're looking at the archaeology of chaco right and so when people are talking about chaco it's
00:03:03
Speaker
you know, it captures the imagination and a lot of archaeologists like Steve Lexington have done a great job of talking about, you know, it really is different than what we see in a lot of the ancestral Pueblo world, right? So it's not only the big great houses in the canyon, but it's also the system, if you want to use that word, similar style architectural complexes that are scattered throughout an area as large as Ireland. Right. And so the question is, how do all of those sites relate to each other? And why do we see such a similar tradition
00:03:33
Speaker
being practiced across such a large area, right? So what mechanisms are controlling those shared architectural traditions at least, if not ceramic traditions and other more social traditions beyond what we see in the archaeological record? So to kind of answer that question, or one way to get at it is to look at Chaco roads, which are these really kind of interesting and complex components of the archaeological landscape.
00:04:00
Speaker
features, the depressions basically that can go on for tens of miles in full continuous segments. And they radiate out from the canyon and there's at least five or six, if not more large regional roads, which go supposedly connect Chaco Canyon with kind of the outlier system that's 60 plus kilometers in distance from the canyon.
00:04:23
Speaker
So people have been, ever since, you know, archaeologists started using aerial imagery, and this is really actually aerial observation. They were up in
GIS and Computational Analysis in Studying Chaco Roads
00:04:32
Speaker
planes and getting aerial photographs. You can see them very well from there, whereas it's hard to see roads from the ground surface. But ever since they started using those data in the late 70s, Chaco roads became a really important component of understanding Chaco system.
00:04:47
Speaker
And so they developed a lot of really cool data and maps about these things, but it's really hard to figure out what they were actually used for. So when GIS and computational analysis became popular, some people like John Kantner started to do research about using least cost analysis to figure out why people might be using roads at a time when they weren't using B-superd and they didn't have wheels. There wasn't, you know, things that you would traditionally associate to people using large roads for.
00:05:14
Speaker
And so least cost analysis is a way to basically say, how can we model how people are moving optimally in a landscape? And I took that, paired it with roads to figure out, you know, where were roads being used as optimal pathways for the economic movement of specific items or resources.
00:05:35
Speaker
What do these roads look like on the ground? How do you identify them? Not from a satellite image, but if you were to be walking across the landscape, what would they appear like?
Construction and Identification of Chaco Roads
00:05:42
Speaker
If you're lucky and you've got a big one that's relatively well preserved, it's a 10 meter wide ish depression that has kind of birming on both sides. So there's very rarely any sort of hyper formalized construction. So it's not like there's masonry edges or birming or full on masonry construction that's framing them. It's really just,
00:06:03
Speaker
a depression with some sort of burning or mounding on both sides. And they're relatively straight in comparison to other types of linear features that you might see. And these are deliberately constructed. They're not just accidental from people walking over the same place repeatedly? I think they're a little bit of both, which makes them really difficult to identify.
00:06:25
Speaker
and also difficult to understand what they were used for. So most of the roads that you see across the entire landscape, they were formally constructed and probably what occurred was the debris from where the roadway would be was moved and pushed to the edges. So that clearing activity created kind of the central lane of the road and then all the debris was moved to the sides and that kind of created the birming.
00:06:50
Speaker
which gives you the general representation of a road. But then continuous use of those probably further formalized the general morphology or characteristics of that feature.
00:07:02
Speaker
Yeah, this is so insane. I didn't really look at the roads that much when we were there. I didn't actually quite honestly think about it that much, but I've heard them referred to as the Chaco and Road Network and roads and stuff like that before. I just thought maybe that's a regional thing, why they're calling that, because normally you hear of Native American trail systems and other things.
00:07:23
Speaker
It's like, my God, I didn't realize they were up to 10 meters wide. I mean, that's like a hall road on a mine. Yeah. They're, they're, they're, they're kind of ridiculously large for unnecessarily large. Right. And that was actually one of like the first interpretations about what they were used for was to answer the question of like, why would you, why would you need a road that that's big? That is that large. And so a couple of the first people,
00:07:51
Speaker
I think like Tom lines and some others thought that you know, they were the roads were used for timber importation, right? So they, they were cutting timbers at like high altitude for and Douglas trees, and like the San Juan's up north and the chuscas are down south towards the Zuni Mountains. They were cutting them there. And then they were transporting them, you know, a really long way and then moving them to the canyon. So so the early interpretations were that they were carrying them kind of
00:08:20
Speaker
width wise. And a lot of these beams were pretty big, you know, on the order of larger than five meters. So they were, they needed a wide road to facilitate basically a bunch of people standing in line with each other hoisting to beam up and walking it the entire day. What questions was your research specifically trying to answer?
Revisiting Chaco Roads' Role in Timber Transportation
00:08:38
Speaker
Well, one, it was to say, um, after John Cantor did a lot of his work, he kind of showed that in some of his models, the roads
00:08:47
Speaker
the actual locations of roads don't fit with where we would assume people would be moving if they were trying to reduce the amount of time it took for move to point A to point B. So he was saying it's pretty much the roads did something other than facilitate economic transportation of people or the things they were carrying. I didn't buy that so much. I thought his research was really well designed and conducted, but kind of with advancements and
00:09:15
Speaker
how people are running these sorts of analyses, I thought it'd be nice to return to them. So we kind of redeveloped some algorithms that were produced to model caloric expenditure. And so we built these algorithms to kind of simulate timber importation because I thought that was a convincing argument, right? It's like they probably weren't carrying food stuff or in large quantities back and forth. But we definitely know
00:09:38
Speaker
through some isotopic analyses that other folks have done, that a lot of the timbers that are located in Chaco Canyon and were used for those big great houses were cut in those resource or procurement locations really far in the distance, right? So if you got that, that's some evidence, right, that I figured they had to be moving them in a slightly efficient way. So we kind of build models to simulate it.
00:10:01
Speaker
So these roadways, if they're being used for transporting timbers and you have resource procurement areas, what's on the far end of the road at the opposite end from Chaco? Are there other communities? Are there other sites of some kind that you can identify as being the sources of these timbers? What are you looking for at that end?
00:10:18
Speaker
both filled the North Road, which is probably the most famous of the Chaco Road system. It's super straight. It kind of aligns almost carnal directions in a really nice way, but it kind of extends from Pueblo Alto, which sits just above the edge of the canyon on the North side of Chaco Canyon and goes all the way up through Pitts Canyon and kind of projects towards the San Juan and La Plata Mountains. And across, you know, that entire system, there's
00:10:46
Speaker
five or six outliers. So there's other additional sites which are associated with Chaco. At the very end of it, it either ends at Chaco or at the mouth of Cuts Canyon or it ends at Salmon and Aztec. So at the very far end, kind of how I imagined it is, there were probably cutting timbers and then you would be leaving them for one or two years because once you fell a tree, you can actually let it dry and it reduces the weight of that by like 50% or something.
00:11:15
Speaker
And so there might have been either resource camps or there might even be maybe not like year round habitations or pit structures or something up there. And then the timbers were first brought towards, you know, the closest community out on the periphery and then it was slowly kind of in a stage wise movement brought towards the canyon.
00:11:37
Speaker
I was just taking a look at one of your maps here within the, uh, within the research, one of your models that you use was called least cost modeling. And, uh, it totally makes sense. And I want to talk about some of these paths and how they lined up with projected road alignments and actual road alignments. Um, and the suggested road alignments based on the past, but first tell our audience, what is, what is least cost modeling? How did you come up with these, uh, uh, with these equations that you used here and how does this, like, what are they kind of inputs you use to get this to work?
00:12:05
Speaker
So, well, Least Cost Modeling has been, I don't know, can't amount of ecologists or economists, but people a lot smarter than me develop these methods and all the algorithms. Least Cost Modeling basically takes a raster or a matrix dataset, right, which has values for each cell.
00:12:25
Speaker
And then it multiplies that entire dataset basically by a series of algorithms or inputs, which basically allows you to say, allows a computer to crunch all those numbers and say, what is the easiest way along a matrix to get from point A to point B? So where's the path with the least accrued cost? And you can use different algorithms to simulate what people are trying to optimize. So most people use an algorithm called Tobler's algorithm.
00:12:54
Speaker
which says is meant to be used in a case where you think people are trying to minimize the amount of time it takes to get from point A to point B. So, you know, I thought that didn't, I mean, if you're carrying something super heavy, like we've all been out there either doing survey and you got a full pack on, right? Half the time you're worried about time. The other half the time, you're like, Oh, my gosh, I feel exhausted, right? I'm actually thinking in terms of like physical exhaustion. So for me,
00:13:20
Speaker
caloric expenditure energy expenditure is equally as valid of a component or condition that people could be thinking about optimizing so. This group of researchers in the late 70s built this thing or constructed this algorithm based off of army marching data.
00:13:40
Speaker
So they were basically capturing data about how much calories people were expending through using certain amounts of weight in their packs and how that changed when they were walking on different types of terrain and all sorts of things. So they have all these inputs. And then we went back through the literature and made some estimates based off of a lot of different data points to recreate the best we could for fitting that algorithm.
00:14:11
Speaker
the size they are from really far away to Chaco Canyon. And then what do you, the modeling, and I take it it's in GIS, right? What's the toolset that you use? Yeah, you can do it in pretty much any sort of GIS out there. So a lot of the early ones were done in ArcGIS. There's a lot of clear workflows, you can do it. You can also run it in R.
00:14:37
Speaker
Which is super nice because it automates and there's a lot of people who some folks out there who have written the Scripts really cleanly and so you can and they're out there on github, which is super nice But some folks out of BYU one of the colleagues I work with Kelsey Reese They've all done a lot of really cool work with this stuff in our so I did similar things And I ran it in both our and arc and it's kind of a trade-off whatever You could do it in queue as well. I guess I mean you'd have to be really you'd have to
00:15:08
Speaker
That'd be a lot more familiar with the grass, but pretty much any GIS will handle it. Why is it important to understand all this stuff? I mean, what's the real benefit here to figuring out, you know, what the best path for these roads were and correlating that to where they're at now? Right. You know, I asked myself that when I was first doing this project, cause it's like, it's super interesting and it's, you can tell awesome stories with archeology, right? But.
00:15:36
Speaker
And grand scheme of things, how do you convince people that it's worth the money for like grants or whatever that we should know why people were using roads in the past, right? Because it's so
00:15:48
Speaker
I mean, really, in my opinion, the most important thing about it is really the understanding what the roads are is a really small component of understanding how this huge system operated in the past, right? So if roads are really one of the best physical lines of evidence we have for how the outlier system is interacting with Chaco Canyon,
00:16:09
Speaker
then we need to utilize and understand exactly how that system might have been used by people in the past to get an understanding of how they were physically interacting with the canyon, how social networks were probably constructed on top of that. And so if, you know, if you have an interpretation about whether that interaction is ritual, economic or some other social mechanism, that's going to dramatically alter what you perceive the Chaco system to look like.
00:16:35
Speaker
And perhaps more importantly, why that system stopped being reified, right? Why did
Importance of Chaco Road System in Regional Understanding
00:16:42
Speaker
people all of a sudden stop building Chaco Great Houses? Well, that can only be answered if you know why people were building Chaco Great Houses in the first place and why they chose to identify with these architectural traditions that emerged in Chaco Canyon. So it's a really small piece.
00:16:58
Speaker
When you mentioned the Great Houses and the importation of this timber, is there a particular time period that we're looking for? I mean, did it happen fairly quickly or is it something that persists through a long span of time? So, Great Houses were built relatively rapidly in terms of there were, you know, construction, there were periods of like episodes of construction, specific traditions which kind of accumulated into what a Chaco Great House is.
00:17:25
Speaker
began in the ninth century and took a long time to become fully formalized. But kind of the classic Chaco period is the middle 11th through the middle 12th period. And so in that hundred year span, whatever specifically Chaco traditions that did emerge in the canyon, all those architectural practices wrapped up and formalized in the construction of an actual great house.
00:17:49
Speaker
in that 100-year span, they started popping up everywhere. And then sometime between 1150 and maybe 1170, they stopped being built pretty much across the region. So yeah, so it was a long accumulation in some senses, but there's rapid changes, certainly.
00:18:10
Speaker
Okay. Well, that's a good stopping point. Let's take this to break and we'll be back on the other side and continue talking to Sean field about the fascinating stuff at Chaco Canyon and around back in a second. Chris Webster here for the archeology podcast network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archeology from around the world.
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00:19:45
Speaker
Welcome back to the Archeotech Podcast, episode 117. Today, we're talking to Sean Field about his GIS work doing lease cost analysis in and around Chaco Canyon. Sean, just before the break, you were talking about the use of the roads and the construction of the great houses in Chaco. I was wondering if you could touch on a little bit about these roads. Earlier on, you were mentioning how you thought they were formed.
00:20:07
Speaker
But do you think that they were formed specifically for transporting things for timbers for these great houses? Or do you think that there were roads that then got repurposed for the transportation of the timber? That is a great question I present. So if you read the paper, I kind of give an answer. I think I dance around it a bit, though, because I'm never really sure where I sit on it. I think it's probably a little bit of both. I think there were certain roads, at least to me,
00:20:37
Speaker
seem like they were built, or at least maintained, for the purpose of bringing timbers to Chaco Canyon. You know, that includes the North Road, which goes, you know, up north to the La Plata, it includes the roads that go to the Chuscas, and then maybe some of the, and it could include some that go to the south, but mainly those to the north and to the west. Whether they were constructed for it or not is a really tough question, right? So we have a very good idea of when timbers were being imported,
00:21:06
Speaker
Right, of course, we have a small sample size, there was something like almost, you know, 240,000 timbers, or beams that were brought into Chaco Canyon within a couple hundred year period, and a very small amount of those have been sampled. So we don't exactly know how many were brought from large areas. But we do know, we have like a really good temporal control on
00:21:31
Speaker
when timbers were cut, right? So we know when they would have needed to be imported, but we don't have good control on when the roads were built because there's very few diagnostic ceramics or other diagnostic materials that are associated with the road. So it's next to impossible to date these things. Even people who had excavated
00:21:51
Speaker
certain great houses where there's a road that runs up really close to the great house, the stratigraphy is not very good either. So because we don't really exactly know when the roads were built, it's almost impossible to answer that question. But some of the least cost modeling certainly indicates, you know, if you make it, and when you're running the models, if you make it easier, even very
00:22:14
Speaker
in very small degrees easier to walk across the road surface. The models basically replicate exactly where the roads are. So you would assume that whether built for it or not, if people were trying to do this, this being moving timbers across a really long area, moving timbers across 70 kilometers, then they were doing it on the roads. I would suppose it's a feedback loop on itself too. Once you have a road, it makes it more likely that you're going to use the road.
00:22:44
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And mathematically, the algorithm doesn't do... It's not really perfectly replicating moving these things, right? The best way I think about it... Have you guys seen... Sure, there's a lot of people who have seen all of the Friends episodes, but there's one episode where Ross and Rachel are carrying a couch and Ross is yelling like, pivot. He's like, pivot, pivot, right? Oh my God. Yeah, I remember that.
00:23:11
Speaker
Well, pretty much how these algorithms work, right, is they're basically calculating slope between two points of elevation, right, and then they're
00:23:21
Speaker
amplifying that through the algorithm that you put in, right? So if you're on the front end of a beam that you're carrying, right? And you're going downhill, you're carrying a lot more of the weight than the people above you, right? So mathematically, this doesn't actually account for that at all. It also doesn't account for how tired you can get. So it's pretty much mathematically saying that.
00:23:42
Speaker
you know, the cost of traveling early in your movement is going to be as much as when you've been hiking all day, which isn't true energetically at all, I'm sure. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of minor flaws in that, uh, which I'm not currently equipped to handle and you have to do a lot of other research just to, to answer those questions. Yeah. Yeah.
00:24:07
Speaker
Now, I found it really interesting, actually, why you were addressing that in your article, because you do say that it doesn't appear that the timbers were dragged. So they would have been carried. We don't have pack animals to carry them either. And it reminded me of something in my dissertation where I was looking at travel along the valley floor in Yemen and trying to, you know, there it was camel traffic.
00:24:33
Speaker
And so that tends to space out about every 40 kilometers because that's about how far a chemical air van goes in a day. And so I was just trying to prove that the sites from the time period I was looking at were spaced roughly 40 kilometers apart. But I did it in grass GIS. I did a cost surface. And what it showed was
00:24:52
Speaker
Yeah, sure. The most obvious is stick to the bottom of the wadi bottom. But it did show also that you could go straight up the cliff faces up onto the high plateau that the wadi cut into. And obviously, that wasn't right. And that was because the model that I was using, our walk model in grass at the time was modeled for human walking, not for camel care vans.
00:25:17
Speaker
And so I found it very interesting the way that you're addressing these questions about how many people are carrying one of these timbers and how long is the timber and such, because those are all things that weren't immediately obvious to me when I first looked at the article, but as I read that, it became very clear that those are real considerations.
00:25:34
Speaker
Yeah. And it's, it's hard to account for all of that. And even, you know, methodologically, right? Um, there's a lot that you can do with manipulating the cost surface to kind of, to, to give some idea about how people would be, to, to try to mimic some assumptions that you have about how people are actually acting in the past, right? Right. So that, I mean, that's, I think your point on, well, you can scale the side of a cliff, right? Is,
00:26:00
Speaker
is a perfect example of that, right? Because you could delimit that. But how do you know that if it was someone actually walking, that that wasn't some option that they considered? Well, I didn't have high resolution images. I was using the shuttle SRTM stuff for my dams. And that wouldn't capture the places where there were actual roadways that were carved into the side of the cliffs that went from the wadi bottom up to the top. Right. You were working with much finer grained dams than I had. Where did you get those
00:26:30
Speaker
Those are just from the USGS. So you can just go through their map portal, which is super good. I think the entire continental United States now has 10 meter elevation. Everyone's flying LiDAR nowadays, right? So there's over the American Southwest and across large parts of the continental United States, the government actually has tons of, I would say, closing in on some meter elevation data that's slowly being released through these.
00:27:00
Speaker
portals and channels and stuff like that, which is super cool. And that's only going to make these types of analyses even more closely aligned with actual human decision making, I think.
00:27:13
Speaker
No, makes sense. Human decision making, you touch both in the introduction and then toward the conclusion of your article, you touch on what's probably a touchy subject about why these roads exist, looking at more purely economic motivations, looking at how much energy one expends to move timbers across landscape and other, let's say you quoted, political, social or ceremonial motivations. Right.
00:27:41
Speaker
And if I am misstating what you said here, but early on, it seemed that you were arguing that the economic ones for a variety of reasons can be maybe more easily modeled with these tools. And so you should approach them first and then look at other reasons for where things match or don't match. Did I get that right? And if so, or if not, could you expand on that, please? Yeah, no, I think generally you got it right is certainly as
00:28:08
Speaker
We should assess what the tools can allow us to assess first. Maybe not first, but we should make sure that we feel confident about that before we totally negate those types of models or those interpretations, right? You know, I think there's probably ways to model ceremonial and more socially complex
00:28:31
Speaker
raster in a way to where you could essentially put like a gravity model around all of the sites, right? And you could multiply that on top of a cost surface raster that's just based off of slope. And that would, you know, that would technically draw the path towards a site, right? So if you were saying like, okay, how would we expect people to get from point A to point B, but in moving from point A to point B, they're trying to see as many other people as possible.
00:29:01
Speaker
right? And so you could do a lot that you could do that type of cost surface manipulation with all sorts of social variables, you would just have to be really confident in the assumptions. And you would have to be clear about how you're mathematically trying to represent the social
00:29:18
Speaker
or human decisions. Right. And that's, that's something that's super important. And, you know, a lot of other people have been working in Chaco far longer than me, and saying some really cool things is ideas that Chaco is a pilgrimage center that people were, you know, going to Chaco for religious or ritual or ceremonial events.
00:29:38
Speaker
And they were doing this on an episodic basis. They also are indicating that their Chaco great houses were built in places where they were meant to be seen. So they were in areas of high visibility. So you could even take if you want to roll off the ideas about visibility in the Chaco world, you could just
00:29:55
Speaker
run a view shed across all of the sites along the roadway corridor, and then you could kind of basically multiply that on top of across surface raster. And then I'm sure that the path would be drawn towards areas of high visibility as long as you manipulated it in the right way. I guess that brings us to a danger with modeling. You can get a model to do whatever you want to do as long as you're manipulating the parameters. So we have to be really careful that
00:30:24
Speaker
It's not circular, right? We're not just saying, gosh, I'd really like it to support this argument, so I'm going to build the parameters of the model in a way that the only outcome is going to be to support my analysis. So I think that's something that's always just attention in GIS and a lot of the methods and technologies being used in archaeology nowadays.
00:30:48
Speaker
Yeah, certainly. Another, like, minor economic point here, but, you know, back to that, the camel caravans example, they typically stop at cities or caravansurize and, you know, and water is a huge driver of where those are located, where those those nodes are. Was that a factor in your study at all? Water travel distances, those sorts of things?
00:31:15
Speaker
Water water distances wasn't that's a that's actually a really great point that I didn't think about at all. Sorry. No, no, I think that's brilliant. We thought about it only in terms of we pretty much we calculated not only from the resource procurement zones to the canyon, but also from site to next nearest site.
00:31:34
Speaker
So we kind of got to it and saying like, okay, people aren't going to be able to walk for four days on end, right? So they're going to want to kind of stop at places where they can sleep overnight and kind of rest a little bit. So I guess water's built into that, because you would assume that there is available sustenance in the places you're stopping. You know, but if you weren't doing that, then there, I mean, there's no doubt the distances are so great that you would need to factor in how you're going to eat and drink.
00:32:02
Speaker
when doing these sort of activities. So that's really clever. How about seasonality? Do you have any input into how seasonality would have affected these or if these activities happened during particular seasons and not others? The best thing we can do for that would be looking at some of the early wood and late wood of the
00:32:27
Speaker
the timber samples themselves. But that's only gonna give us an idea about when the tree was cut, right? So we don't really know exactly how much time was taken up between when it was cut, how long it was dry rested, and then how long it until it was actually imported. So it's really tough to say. I would assume, you know, there's certain things where
00:32:52
Speaker
if we accept the notion that they were doing it optimally and they were trying to preserve as much energy as possible, moving in cold months where there's not snow would make the most sense, right? Because in a lot of these arid environments, it's easier to walk on non-compact Earth if it's slightly harder. There's a little bit of moisture and that moisture is really cold because it makes a compact surface versus you're not going to want to walk in the rain because that's miserable and you're not going to walk when there's snow.
00:33:22
Speaker
that that would require. Until that's archaeologists. That's exactly right. Oh, man. Chris is fielder. CRM archaeologist comes out there. Walking the snow in my ass. I'll tell you what.
00:33:42
Speaker
Uh, yeah, it does make you wonder how our, our, our procedures and things that we're leaving today will be interpreted in 2000 years, you know, and, uh, if we're gone from this planet, like looking at, looking at these chocolate and roads and you're doing these, these analysis to say, well, what is the, I mean, least cost analysis says it all right there. You know, what is the least amount of effort, you know, it takes to get from here to there. What, what path is the best, but then take a look at one of our housing developments with windy curvy roads that are put there on purpose.
00:34:11
Speaker
just because it looks prettier than a straight road. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's so many other components that go into decision-making than beyond. We just want to do it. And there was something, I saw a study that this architectural group, they were hired by a college to put in concrete walkways
00:34:34
Speaker
across the campus, right? And so what they did is actually they took a six month period where they just didn't do anything. And they watched where people were going themselves. And then they put the pathways there to kind of like only put concrete where they knew people were already walking, right? And something they struggled with is they saw that where people are walking changed across time across seasons, it was dependent on, you know, how many people weren't
00:35:01
Speaker
how many classes they had, what the makeup of was the majors and minors and all that sort of stuff, right? It's like, you know, how do you handle that controlling for all of that nuance a thousand years ago, right? Yeah, indeed. All right. Well, we are just about out of time here, Sean, where are you going from here? What are you studying next? Uh, so I'm working in Mesa Verde, so up in Mesa Verde national park. So I'm getting my,
00:35:28
Speaker
hopefully get my doctorate. I actually just finished my comprehensive exams. Thank you. Happy to never have to do that again. Oh, yeah. But I'm working up on a possible Chaco outlier up in Mesa Verde National Park called Farview with Dr.
Future Research Plans in Mesa Verde National Park
00:35:46
Speaker
Zana Galacki. And so we're kind of figuring out and trying to see what
00:35:55
Speaker
Chaco traditions were doing up there. White people who have a unique history themselves were picking up on Chaco ideas, implementing them, and how that also ties in with climate variability and other unique community dynamics, which are important up in the northern San Juan. Cool. Do you plan to apply other GIS techniques to this? Are you done with LCA for now or is it something you're going to revisit?
00:36:22
Speaker
I might revisit some LCA. The GIS stuff that I do, a lot of it will be, you know, we're going to be using a lot of remote sensing data and stuff like that. We'll do some hydrology analyses, but I'd also, we're going to do a lot of spatial and cluster analyses to figure out how residential structures are clustering or disaggregating across time because they, you know, there is some relationship between social distance and spatial distance, right?
00:36:49
Speaker
and hopefully develop a series of analytical tools to figure out if there's times when the aggregation or disaggregation is severe enough that we can consider it a unique shift in settlement strategy and then correlate those with unique shifts in climatic conditions to see if we can tease out some of the relationship between humans over a long span of time and the climate that they're situated in.
00:37:17
Speaker
Um, so hopefully, yeah, it'll be super GIS dependent. Cool. We have to come back on when you have some, uh, some new results to show us. Oh yeah. I'd love to. I really appreciate the opportunity to chat away and blabber on about all things. So thank you. No, that's very interesting. Thank you. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Sean. And yeah, when you, uh, have more stuff that you want to come on and talk about, like this miss severity worker or anything else, then please reach out and we'll get you back on the show.
00:37:46
Speaker
Sounds great. Thank you. All right. Take care. Good luck. We'll take our final break now and Paul and I will come back for our app of the day segment back in a minute. You may have heard my pitch from membership. It's a great idea and really helps out. However, you can also support us by picking up a fun t-shirt, sticker, or something from a large selection of items from our tea public store. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash shop for a link. That's arcpodnet.com slash shop to pick up some fun swag and support the show.
00:38:15
Speaker
All right, welcome back to the RKO tech podcast. One 17 is the episode and this is the app of the day segment. And I'm going to just go ahead and start here with the third in a series from a company called two steps beyond. It's a couple I've been following on YouTube with their boat and RV travels, but they're also app developers and.
00:38:33
Speaker
They've got another great app and you can get all three of these as a download from Apple. I know that. I think they're individually available on Google Play, but you should find a link in the show notes to their page, which will link to either the app store, one of the Google Play one. But this one's basically just what it says, public lands, which is really kind of cool. It's a really high res map and it shows you, you can click up in the,
00:38:56
Speaker
gear icon and you can uncheck everything. Everything's checked automatically and they've got everything from BLM, Forest Service, Park Service, National Monuments, Army, Corps of Land, Fish and Wildlife, Bureau of Reclamation, everybody here and you can uncheck these and just see the ones you want to see. You can also go to the websites for these various agencies and to be honest that's basically it. They've got satellite standard view which is just a
00:39:22
Speaker
you know, regular kind of, you know, basic street map kind of thing with the overlays and then, uh, satellite view. So you can overlay that, uh, and then basic, which is basically just really pulls away all the extras from the map and just kind of shows you the areas. And then you can hide the overlays if you want, if it's getting in the way and you can see where you're at and what you're looking at here and then turn the overlay back on. And then of course it's got a little dot showing you exactly where you're at in relation to all of this. Um, it's got a search function too, and I haven't really played with that too much, but it's, uh,
00:39:52
Speaker
I know when you're out here in the West, man, just trying to figure out who's land you're on sometimes. I mean, if you're in Nevada, you can make a pretty darn good guess that you're on BLM land, but not always. And the weird thing is if you want to know, like, if you're in forest service, land, their forest service land boundaries are really fuzzy. They're really broad. And you might think, man, I passed through the Toyobi national forest like a few days ago or a few hours ago. Am I still in it? I didn't see a sign. And you might be surprised because you're like, there's literally no trees around me anymore.
00:40:21
Speaker
am I in the National Forest? And yep, sure enough, you are in the National Forest still. So because their land extends out beyond the tree line, of course. I don't know how they decide where that goes, but it's an interesting thing to see anyway. So another thing that shows just kind of
00:40:37
Speaker
by not showing it because it's not an overlay, but, uh, military land. There's a lot of military land in Nevada and those are the big white spots that don't show up as anything. It's just like this, the sea of orange BLM land. And then the white spots where it's all military, nothing to see here folks to move along.
00:40:57
Speaker
It's the perfect thing they could have chosen to represent that too, is not representing it. So that's pretty much it. I think I got this app and then the other two that I talked about, which was one was called Coverage and the other one was called State Lines. I'm pretty sure I paid $8.99 for all three of them.
00:41:18
Speaker
as a package. I think that was a little bit of a deal. Otherwise, I think they're two, three bucks a piece. And again, this is not some big app conglomerate. This is literally two people working out of their boat and RV. They've been digital nomads since about 2006. And they created apps that they wanted to use and the people they know wanted to use. And I can wholeheartedly support that.
00:41:38
Speaker
I had no problem throwing them a few bucks for these apps just to keep all that going because not only are they throwing these apps together that they want to use, but they're actually really well done. They're thought out. They're not over complicated. They do exactly what they need to do and nothing more. There's no feature creep where they're just like, let's add this, let's add that. Nope, it does exactly what it says. And in some ways I appreciate that.
00:42:01
Speaker
All right. I think that's all I've got. The link for that is in the show notes and next week as a preview or next time I'm going to talk about their website actually, and it's called the mobile internet resource center. So go check that out, but I'll talk about that in more in depth next time out. So Paul, what do you got?
00:42:16
Speaker
Okay, so I've got another one that's by a small shop. It's called Just Six Weeks. It's available for iOS and Android for free with some ads and some limitations, or $2.99 for the quote-unquote pro version. The app developer is Alexander Lomackin. He doesn't have a website that I've been able to find, but the app is available on Google Play and Apple App Store. And what this is is a workout app.
00:42:42
Speaker
And the reason why I downloaded this one was a few weeks back, one of my coworkers was, oh, you know, in the middle of something, an alarm went off and he said, oh, I got to do my pushups.
00:42:54
Speaker
So yeah, so I got this app and it's getting me to do 100 pushups over the course of however long he had it set for. Not at once, but 100 pushups in a day. And that's what he was going to. And he is a very avid user of different apps and things. So after a couple times of that interruption over the course of a week, I decided to go take a look because I could probably use doing some pushups myself.
00:43:20
Speaker
And what I realized was that there's a whole bunch of apps like this. And so I picked just six weeks because based off of the screenshots, it looked like it was pretty good. It was reasonably well rated. The one that he was using was a little confusing because there were two that had the exact same name and the exact same icon and the exact same screenshots in the app store. And it just didn't make sense which one one would choose.
00:43:44
Speaker
And so what it is is, again, kind of a one-trip pony app. The free version just gives you push-ups, though if you pay for it, you can also get, let's see, sit-ups, bench dips, squats, plank pull-ups, or dips. And so it calibrates you, it has you do a number of push-ups in one go, and then it builds out a schedule for you and gives you reminders. And
00:44:11
Speaker
It's not to single out this particular app, it seems totally fine. It's just that it was interesting to me that these exercise ones have become such a big thing that there were so many of them available on the App Store. I shouldn't have been surprised because a few years ago, there was the seven-minute workout ones, I think that was started by Johnson and Johnson. The Johnson and Johnson one is what I still have on my phone.
00:44:35
Speaker
And the reason why I wanted to talk about this is I'm sure that this app is just fine. I probably won't be using it myself because I absolutely hate working out.
00:44:48
Speaker
I like exercise. I hate working out. It's weird. It's me. That's why I have this seven minute workout that I never look at and haven't used other than for a couple months when I first got it. But Johnson and Johnson, at least, I had some ability to believe that there was some hard science behind what they had done.
00:45:08
Speaker
This other one, you know, the guy might be great. He might be extremely smart. He might even have a background in sports medicine or something, but I don't really know. And I certainly don't know it across all the dozens of different pushup apps that I saw. And that just brings up the question to me is that when I look at these things, my default is, oh, it says it's scientifically tested.
00:45:29
Speaker
by whom, and how, and when, and don't actually know the answers to any of those questions. So if you're looking at these, look at them, but maybe carry that little caveat around that you might not necessarily get what's advertised on the TIN.
00:45:48
Speaker
Yeah, you might not. So, uh, I just downloaded this and I'm interested to see, and I'll report back later. I'll be interested to see when I do my pushups to, to get my workout plan. If the app just like crashes and fails and says it's going to take you way longer than six weeks to get to a hundred pushups a day.
00:46:07
Speaker
The one thing I found odd about it when I first did my push-ups was that I couldn't figure out how to put the number. There was a circle with a zero in it, and I'm like, well, I definitely did more than zero. But I couldn't tap anything. And then it turned out that they had a strange interface that was kind of like a picker where you scroll through a list of something, but it was horizontal. And so I had to scroll.
00:46:30
Speaker
off to the right to about 86 or whatever I did. Yeah, not really 86. Not really 86. But other than that, I did more than six. I did more than eight.
00:46:48
Speaker
But yeah, that was a little weird. And we'll see if I continue to use it as we go forward, if I find other, you know, interface oddities about this one, but everything else seems really straightforward. You know, it's got graphing, it's got the alarms, you can set custom alarms.
00:47:04
Speaker
It shows you in little tiles once it's done that first assessment what you're gonna do. So it told me when I finished with the initial set, it said to give myself two or three days break before I actually start in on it. I don't think I'm gonna need to go three days. And then it says week one, day one, and it's got me eight, nine, 10, eight, and six plus, and I can start that. And then week one, day two, which would be a couple days after that, and so on. And so it's broken down into nice tabs that I can flip through.
00:47:32
Speaker
So, I know what to expect coming up week by week. So, we'll maybe report back to see if this actually gets me doing push-ups. Well, I will tell you what, six weeks from now is three episodes from now. So, on episode 120, if you made 100 push-ups a day by then, we'll just put up a picture of your bicep with no explanation and only dedicated listeners to the Architect podcast will know what that means.
00:48:00
Speaker
They're going to look and say, this guy's really scrawny. That's one of the reasons why I don't like working out, because my upper body does not build muscle. It never has. I can be strong, but not muscular. And so it's a little, after it gets a little depressing. Yeah. Yeah.
00:48:17
Speaker
All right. Well, I think that's enough for this time. We've got a lot of interviews actually scheduled, so that's going to be great. Next time we're going to Mesa Verde. Sean was talking about that. It's actually one of his colleagues that we're going to be talking about or talking to. So tune in for that next time. And then we've got a few more good episodes all the way out into January that we're really looking forward to. So if you're interested in talking to us about your research or you know somebody that would be a great interview subject for us, then reach out our contact info in the show notes.
00:48:45
Speaker
If you've got something to write down now, it's just chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com is a good start. Or if you happen to be looking at the page for this on the web over on the right side in the column, there's a little link that says schedule an interview. Again, we're out to end of January, I think right now. So you got some time to think about it and plan. But yeah, we're always looking for new interviews. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Paul. Thanks, Chris. Yep. And we'll see everybody next time. Take care. Bye.
00:49:16
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:49:41
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:50:03
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to arcpotnet.com slash members for more info.