[Chacmool-l] Wednesday Lunch Speaker

[Chacmool Archaeology Association]

There is more Chacmool information to come...just waiting for confirmations:)


Archaeology Department Noon Hour Lecture Series
    	Speaker: Lindsay Amundsen-Meyer (University of Calgary)
    	Where: Earth Sciences 859
    	When: February 6, 2013 from 12:00-1:00 pm
Happy Trails to You: Geographic Information Systems Analysis of the Old
North Trail
The Old North Trail was the main north to south link running along the
eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains, within the homeland of the Blackfoot
people, essentially paralleling the current path of Highway 2 through
Alberta. While traveling along this trail, human groups stopped at
resource patches and important landmarks, leaving evidence of their
passing in the form of campsites, kill sites, isolated finds and artifact
scatters, stone alignments and rock art. In order to study human movement
along the trail and settlement patterns in its vicinity, it is first
necessary to analyze the geographic location of the trail itself. This
presentation will discuss ideas about movement in the Northwestern Plains
context, examine the historical and archaeological evidence for the Old
North Trail, and discuss use of least-cost path analysis within a
geographic information system to model the route of the trail itself.
Finally, where differences exist between the location of least-cost paths
and the course of the Old North Trail reconstructed from historic and
archaeological records, the “pull” factors that may have been moving human
groups away from the most efficient route across the landscape will be
explored.