Mark C Rupert
Searching for Paleolithic Occupation Sites in Oregon
This project grew out of my shared interest in archaeology, cartography, and photography thatguided my exploration of the Western Great Basin and influenced my GIS Thesis at Clackamas Community College in 2020.
The time I've spent immersed the high desert for days and weeks at a time reignited my fascination with archaeology and led me to begin collecting archaeological research papers and site reports, books on emerging theories of human history and anything else concerning the ongoing effort to locate and preserve archaeological evidence of the earliest humans.
Frigid nights spent camping on the shores of vast desert playas, and blistering hot days spent dodging rattlesnakes and poison oak while searching for the next trickle of spring water hidden deep in some shaded canyon have helped me to internalize and understand the ancient connection between humans, water, and the land.
As I began my work in GIS, these experiences informed my experiments using archaeological, climatic, and geological data to predict where early people may have traveled among the receding glaciers and lived along the fluctuating shorelines of the vast pluvial lakes of the Western Great Basin.
This series of maps explores the theoretical possibility of "Mapping High Probability Search Areas for Paleolithic Occupation Sites" in relation to Pleistocene Pluvial Lakeshores, known Paleolithic Occupation Sites, and Obsidian Tool Stone Sources in Oregon using GIS technology in order to facilitate future archaeological field surveys in search of previously undiscovered paleolithic occupation sites in Oregon.
The next step, of course, is to test the theory by conducting informal pedestrian and UAV field surveys of my own. If I manage to locate any significant artifacts or occupation sites, this theoretical exercise could very well become a standard archaeological practice for future field surveys throughout the Great Basin.
