Dylan S. Davis

Columbia University | CU · Columbia Climate School

Archaeologists interested in the evolution of anthropogenic landscapes have productively adopted Niche Construction Theory (NCT), in order to assess long-term legacies of human-environment interactions. Applications of NCT have especially been used to elucidate co-evolutionary dynamics in agricultural and pastoral systems. Meanwhile, foraging and/o...

Palaeoenvironmental data indicate that the climate of southwestern Madagascar has changed repeatedly over the past millennium. Combined with socio-political challenges such as warfare and slave raiding, communities continually had to mitigate against risk. Here, the authors apply social network analysis to pottery assemblages from sites on the Velo...

Throughout the history of archaeology, researchers have evaluated human societies in terms of systems and systems interactions. Complex systems theory (CST), which emerged in the 1980s, is a framework that can explain the emergence of new organizational forms. Its ability to capture nonlinear dynamics and account for human agency make CST a powerfu...

Communities in resource-poor areas face health, food production, sustainability, and overall survival challenges. Consequently, they are commonly featured in global debates surrounding societal collapse. Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is often used as an example of how overexploitation of limited resources resulted in a catastrophic population collapse....

Many communities in southwestern Madagascar rely on a mix of foraging, fishing, farming, and herding, with cattle central to local cultures, rituals, and intergenerational wealth transfer. Today these livelihoods are critically threatened by the intensifying effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. Improved understanding of ancient communit...

The environmental impacts of human societies are generally assumed to correlate with factors such as population size, whether they are industrialized, and the intensity of their landscape modifications (e.g., agriculture, urban development). As a result, small-scale communities with subsistence economies are often not the focus of long-term studies...

For the last seven years, PlanetScope satellites have started near-daily imaging of parts of the Earth’s surface, making high-density multitemporal, multispectral, 3-m pixel imagery accessible to researchers. Multitemporal satellite data enables landscape archaeologists to examine changes in environmental conditions at time scales ranging from dail...

Critical data concerning key developments in global human history now lie submerged on continental shelves where investigations confront significant challenges. Whereas underwater excavations and surveys are expensive and weather dependent and require specialized training and equipment, remote sensing methods can improve chances for success offshor...

Lidar datasets have been crucial for documenting the scale and nature of human ecosystem engineering and land use. Automated analysis methods, which have been rising in popularity and efficiency, allow for systematic evaluations of vast landscapes. Here, we use a Mask R-CNN deep learning model to evaluate terracing—artificially flattened areas surr...

This rapid communication describes a lithic blade that was recently recovered during excavations in the Velondriake Marine Protected Area in southwest Madagascar. This represents the only recorded archaeological lithic blade recovered from southwest Madagascar. The blade was recovered in situ at a depth of 1.66 m, a deposit dating to between 750 an...

This study presents preliminary results from recent bathymetric LiDAR-guided surveys of submerged archaeological landscapes in the Apalachee Bay off the coast of Florida. We show how bathymetric LiDAR can re-identify previously recorded archaeological sites and identify new cultural deposits at shallow depths and help aid SCUBA surveys of submerged...

People on Madagascar have coped with environmental change for millennia. Present-day environmental change, however, is negatively impacting the livelihoods and sustainability of coastal communities on Madagascar. As a result of increasing climate-driven impacts on livelihoods and economic development initiatives, community settlement strategies are...

Narratives of landscape degradation are often linked to unsustainable fire use by local communities. Madagascar is a case in point: the island is considered globally exceptional, with its remarkable endemic biodiversity viewed as threatened by unsustainable anthropogenic fire. Yet, fire regimes on Madagascar have not been empirically characterised...

Over the past several centuries, the iron industry played a central role in the economy of Sweden and much of northern Europe. A crucial component of iron manufacturing was the production of charcoal, which was often created in charcoal piles. These features are visible in LiDAR (light detection and ranging) datasets. These charcoal piles vary in t...

FULL TEXT AVAILABLE HERE: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/BRW6SHCFURWJI5YX7IAV?target=10.1002/arp.1837 Within archaeology, concern over ethics has become a centre point of debate, particularly in terms of cultural patrimony, repatriation, intellectual property rights, and the display of sensitive items (Conkey & Gero, 1997; Fabian, 20...

Among archaeologists using remote sensing there is tremendous potential for the use of deep learning models for the prospection of archaeological features. The need for relatively large training datasets, technical expertise, and computational requirements, however, has slowed the adoption of these techniques. Here, we train a series of deep earnin...

Climate change and anthropogenic activities are actively destroying the archaeological record. The dramatic disappearance of archaeological landscapes becomes particularly problematic when they are also unrecorded. Hidden from view and eroding, these disappearing landscapes likely hold answers to important anthropological questions. As such, disapp...

In the mid-Holocene (5000-3000 cal B.P.), Native American groups constructed shell rings, a type of circular midden, in coastal areas of the American Southeast. These deposits provide important insights into Native American socioeconomic organization but are also quite rare: only about 50 such rings have been documented to date. Recent work using a...

Archaeological deposits in southwest Madagascar – which have been occupied by foraging populations for millennia – generally bear ephemeral traces of past human activity and lack the intensive kinds of landscape modification that remote sensing archaeologists typically look for as evidence of human environmental impacts (e.g., agricultural modifica...

Automated remote sensing has made substantial breakthroughs for archaeological investigation. Over the past 20 years, the reliability of these methods has vastly improved, and the total number of practitioners has been increasing. Nonetheless, much of the work conducted, to date, focuses almost exclusively on specific topographic features and monum...

Remote sensing technology has become a standard tool for archaeological prospecting. Yet the ethical guidelines associated with the use of these technologies are not well established and are even less-often discussed in published literature. With a nearly unobstructed view of large geographic spaces, aerial and spaceborne remote sensing technology...

Climate change is negatively impacting coastal communities around the world at an increasing rate. Archaeology provides a deep-time perspective into the impacts of climate change on human populations, as our species has coped with this issue for most of our existence. This project investigates the relationship between human living strategies and en...

Madagascar is the subject of intense debate among archaeologists and holds important information pertaining to human-environmental interactions, particularly related to coping with extreme climate change. The archaeological record can elucidate these important dynamics, but archaeological deposits in this area generally bear ephemeral traces of pas...

Madagascar has undergone decades of archaeological research, but roughly 75% of the island's land area remains unexplored archaeologically. The known archaeological record is also biased toward later sites due to the ephemeral nature of the earliest populations. Systematic archaeological investigations are necessary to address such biases in the ar...

Landscape archaeology has a long history of using predictive models to improve our knowledge of extant archaeological features around the world. Important advancements in spatial statistics, however, have been slow to enter archaeological predictive modeling. Point process models (PPMs), in particular, offer a powerful solution to explicitly model...

In the 21st century, advances in computer science have impacted archaeology, most recently in the development of automated algorithms. Like most technology, these methods have been the source of ongoing debate, particularly in their utility for archaeology. Here, I focus on a contribution of automation and machine learning in archaeology that is of...

Archaeologists have struggled to combine remotely sensed datasets with preexisting information for landscape-level analyses. In the American Southeast, for example, analyses of lidar data using automated feature extraction algorithms have led to the identification of over 40 potential new pre-European-contact Native American shell ring deposits in...

Investigation of submerged cultural heritage is an important area of archeological focus. However, the expense of acquiring the necessary data to conduct studies of underwater landscapes is often prohibitive to many researchers. Within the United States, highly resolved bathymetric data are openly available from governmental agencies, and yet littl...

A vast majority of the archaeological record, globally, is understudied and increasingly threatened by climate change, economic and political instability, and violent conflict. Archaeological data are crucial for understanding the past, and as such, documentation of this information is imperative. The development of machine intelligence approaches...

Africa represents a vast region where remote sensing technologies have been largely uneven in their archaeological applications. With impending climate-related risks such as increased coastal erosion and rising sea levels, coupled with rapid urban development, gaps in our knowledge of the human history of this continent are in jeopardy of becoming...

Africa represents a vast region where remote sensing technologies have been largely uneven in their archaeological applications. With impending climaterelated risks such as increased coastal erosion and rising sea levels, coupled with rapid urban development, gaps in our knowledge of the human history of this continent are in jeopardy of becoming p...

For all supplemental files, please go to: https://doi.org/10.26207/1a47-pw11. All necessary datasets to replicate the analyses in the manuscript are available from Penn State's ScholarSphere repository.

For all supplemental files, please go to: https://doi.org/10.26207/1a47-pw11. All necessary datasets to replicate the analyses in the manuscript are available from Penn State's ScholarSphere repository.

Despite decades of archaeological research, much of Madagascar remains archaeologically unexplored. The oldest sites on the island are difficult to locate, as they contain the ephemeral remains of mobile forager campsites. Thus, the known archaeological record is biased toward later sites, particularly in areas with histories of urbanization and co...

Environmental archaeological enquiry has a long and vibrant history. Many of the same questions have persisted in archaeological dialogues over the past century. In particular, the effects of environmental change on demographic patterns, health, and societal stability are among the most pervasive questions being addressed by anthropological researc...

In 2018, we identified over 50 new potential shell rings in Beaufort County, SC using LiDAR and automated feature extraction algorithms. Further analysis of this data has confirmed the archaeological nature of several of these deposits. This poster details further analysis of these features. We find that the majority of these rings are significantl...

Supplemental table for: 'Davis, Dylan S., Carl P. Lipo, and Matthew C. Sanger. 2019. “A Comparison of Automated Object Extraction Methods for Earthwork Feature Identification in South Carolina.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2018.10.035.' Additional data available at https://orb.binghamton.edu/ant...

One persistent archaeological challenge is the generation of systematic documentation for the extant archaeological record at the scale of landscapes. Often our information for landscapes is the result of haphazard and patchy surveys that stem from opportunistic and historic efforts. Consequently, overall knowledge of some regions is the product of...

Object based image analysis (OBIA) is a method of assessing remote sensing data that uses morphometric and spectral parameters simultaneously to identify features in remote sensing imagery. Over the past 10-15 years, OBIA methods have been introduced to detect archaeological features. Improvements in accuracy have been attained by using a greater n...

The study of pre-contact anthropogenic mounded features- earthen mounds, shell heaps, and shell rings - in the American Southeast is stymied by the spotty distribution of systematic surveys across the region. Many extant, yet unidentified, archaeological mound features continue to evade detection due to the heavily forested canopies that occupy lar...

Supplemental Table for Davis et al. (2018) "Automated mound detection using LiDAR survey in Beaufort County, SC" Southeastern Archaeology, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 0734578X.2018.1482186.

Artificial mounds and rings are morphologically heterogeneous. While they share many compositional traits (i.e. many are composed of either soil or substantial shell material and have above-ground profiles), their outlines widely vary across geographic regions. As such, automated identification of such deposits requires the use of algorithms that a...

Artificial mounds and rings are morphologically heterogeneous. While they share many compositional traits, their outlines on landscapes widely vary across geographic regions. As such, automated identification of these deposits requires the use of algorithms that are capable of evaluating a range of criteria and assessing objects that fall within ac...

Ist issue of the IJSRA (International Journal of Student Research in Archaeology). Includes original research papers, book reviews, conference reviews and interviews. Author list here reflects editorial board and article authors. Contents: Gonzalo Linares Matás - A student perspective on the present of archaeology: IJSRA editorial Gonzalo Linar...

2nd issue of the IJSRA (International Journal of Student Research in Archaeology). Includes original research papers, book and literature reviews, conference reviews and interviews. Author list here reflects editorial board and article authors. Contents: Gonzalo Linares Matás - Presentation of the Second Issue of IJSRA Interview Hannah F. Ryan...

Costly signaling theory (CST) explains a variety of elaborate behavioral displays as a consequence of competition over resources when the risk of direct conflict is high. Within an archaeological context, monumental architecture is potentially explained as a facet of costly signaling between individuals and groups. On Rapa Nui, CST offers an explan...

The use of multispectral imagery is particularly effective for mapping the archaeological record of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) due to the island’s lack of vegetation and exposed surface lithic features. In 2010, Flaws demonstrated that near-infrared (NIR) imagery can be used to identify “lithic mulch” gardens, areas of cultivation that are enhanced t...

High-resolution multispectral imagery provides an effective means for measuring the archaeological record of Rapa Nui. Previous work has suggested that the island's prehistoric cultivation features known as " lithic mulch gardens " can be identified using near infrared imagery (NIR). Lithic mulching was a laborious but critical strategy for prehist...