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By Boat or by Land – GIS Least-Cost Modeling of Indigenous Native American Transportation Choices in the San Francisco Bay Area

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“And in Length of Days Understanding” (Job 12:12)

Part of the book series: Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology ((IDCA))

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Abstract

Archaeological applications of transportation cost studies have largely focused on walking and walking carrying loads across the landscape. We present a similar analysis using GIS least cost analysis of paddling small traditional watercraft. These boats, built of bundles of tule reeds readily available from the San Francisco Bay’s ubiquitous marshes, share much in common with traditional reed boats used for riverine and seagoing travels in a wide range of settings throughout the world including ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Lake Titicaca. Based on available information on Native American tule reed balsa watercraft of the region, published boat and metabolic metrics and crowd-sourced metabolic measurements we build a model to estimate metabolic cost of transport for individuals, pairs of rowers and loads. Additionally, we derive estimates of efficiency to compare least-cost water travel to land travel between a series of Native American ethnohistoric village locations in the San Francisco Bay area. Finally, we identify shortcomings of this method and discuss possible solutions. Overall, the results reveal that in typical weather conditions boat travel will be more energetically efficient and faster, particularly when goods are being transported.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Far Western Anthropological Research Group, Davis, CA, USA

    Brian F. Byrd & Paul Brandy

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  1. Brian F. Byrd
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  2. Paul Brandy
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Correspondence to Brian F. Byrd .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Erez Ben-Yosef

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Ian W. N. Jones

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Byrd, B.F., Brandy, P. (2023). By Boat or by Land – GIS Least-Cost Modeling of Indigenous Native American Transportation Choices in the San Francisco Bay Area. In: Ben-Yosef, E., Jones, I.W.N. (eds) “And in Length of Days Understanding” (Job 12:12). Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27330-8_66

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27330-8_66

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