As part of the internship seminar, we were to celebrate GIS Day (which is technically in November, but that doesn't mean we can't observe it at another time of year) by sharing GIS with others. Conveniently, I had already planned to attend the Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference in Virginia Beach last weekend, where I gave a presentation about some of the work I'm doing for my internship project--specifically, georeferencing several historic maps of the region where our archaeological site is located. Unfortunately, since I'm still in the process of georeferencing, we haven't been able to do much with them in GIS yet, but I spoke about the benefits of eventually being able to overlay them with other GIS data and use them to digitize features like historic road networks and the locations of other plantations, mills, stores, and other sites that are now long gone, all in the interest of helping to contextualize our site.
The conference is typically attended by professional archaeologists in academic, government, and private sector positions, along with many students. My presentation was in a session organized around a regional theme, but the following day I was able to attend another session that was all about applying GIS to archaeology. All of the papers in that session were great, but one that I found particularly interesting (and important) was about creating detailed predictive models to assess the risk sea level rise poses to coastal sites and estimate how long it will take for those sites to be destroyed. All in all, it was a great conference. It's exciting to hear what other people are working on and that they're interested in my work, too.
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