ABSTRACT
For today’s archaeologist, digital tools, such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, and computer-assisted simulation, can play an equally fundamental role in formulating explanations of the past, as do more traditional archaeological techniques (e.g. excavation or material studies). Digital applications perhaps have made the greatest impact on archaeology by facilitating the analysis of complex matrices of data distributed at various scales. For example, GIS is commonly used to study the spatial relationships of various archaeological elements ranging in scale from ceramic distributions at the site level, to archaeological feature distributions across large regions. In addition, digital technology is frequently used to model social and environmental landscapes, which has enabled archaeologists to better contextualize the places that humans have occupied in the past. This chapter explores how digital techniques can be used to model the social and economic landscapes of mobile pastoralists, and more specifically, addresses how archaeological and ecological data of various conceptual and analytical scales can be correlated in a digital environment to provide a more refined picture of the spatial and temporal patterns of movement for pastoral societies during prehistory. The approach presented in this chapter will help archaeologists to reconcile the inherent gap between the location of archaeological remains within various landscapes and the scales of spatial and temporal variability that brought these landscapes to life in the past.
