A GIS method for assessing the zone of human-environmental impact around archaeological sites: a test case from the Late Neolithic of Wadi Ziqlâb, Jordan

The Mediterranean Landscape Dynamics (MedLanD) project is attempting to better understand the long-term effects of human agropastoral landuse on environmental degradation (Barton et al., 2010). A major component of this type of research involves modeling the zone of environmental impact surrounding archaeological sites. It is inadequate to use traditional archaeological, geoarchaeological, ethnoarchaeological, or ecological approaches in isolation from one another for this task. Danti (2000) makes it clear thatdfrom a landscape perspectivedthe true zone of impact around a site is the sum of both the agricultural and pastoral catchments, and that to fully understand the extent and nature of these impacts, one must connect information gained through all of these methods of investigation into a single coherent model. There is abundant ethnographic and archaeological information regarding location of agricultural impacts (e.g., Kramer, 1982; Watson, 1979; Wilkinson, 2003), which has allowed for very detailed agricultural simulations to be constructed (e.g., the ENKIMDU model (Altaweel, 2008)). There is, however, much less information regarding the location of the impacts of pastoralism. Because the long-term signatures of pastoral landuse are fairly ephemeral even in comparison to those few that are left by agriculture, traditional archaeological methods provide only indirect evidence for the extent and nature of pastoral exploitation around sites. This paper examines the available ethnographic, ecological, and archaeological data on ovicaprid pastoral economies, and provides a method for modeling pastoral catchments from archaeological data using a new GIS-based technique for delimiting catchment boundaries. I define the term “pastoral catchment” as the area around a site commonly used by animals associated with that sitedespecially the area within which those animals are pastured on a regular basis. This definition is comparable to the idea of a “herding radius” as proposed by Coppolillo (2000). In this paper, I use spatially explicit computer simulation as an experimental laboratory to better understand the ecological footprint of pastoralism during the Late Neolithic (8000/