Welcome to the PaleoMaps 2019 Workshop

Environmentally explicit modeling applications are becoming more and more established in the archaeological and pre-history domain. The variety in different modeling applications is broad, techniques like Agent Based Modeling, Species Distribution Modeling, Site Catchment Analysis and Least Cost Pathes, Network Analysis, Dispersal models with differing methodological approaches, Machine Learning approaches to spatially explicit archaeological questions, etc., are applied manifold nowadays. All these model have in common, that they depend to a varying degree on some explicit model (or map) of a paleoenvironment. For implementing spatially explicit models we need according paleoenvironmental data that represents the spatio-temporal context of the modeling application. But this aspect is often just some minor side note in published archaeological modeling studies. This workshop aims to focus on the representation of paleoenvironments in these modeling applications.

The first day of the workshop will deal with the question of how to compile spatio-temporal data sets, that can be applied in modeling applications such as agent based models, species distribution models or other modeling applications within the paleoenvironmental and archaeological realm. The workshop will start with an introductory presentation, laying out the current lack of, and potential approaches for a framework, that allows to collect and create geospatial information describing paleoenvironments, that can be used by archaeological modeling applications. This will be followed by the invited talks adressing specific aspects of how to acquire, model and implement paleoenvironmental data sets.