Distance to Water

 As I mentioned previously the project we are working on, and the question we are seeking to answer/learn about is, "Do we see any current correlation between areas of high archeological importance and the location of water bodies at the resolution of the ATS section?".  The initial work I had done which included reading some papers on similar projects all turned up the concept that water was an important predictor, but was really only one of many.  

The way I had envisioned going forward with this project was to take all of the LHR (Listing of Historic Resources) data and sort of boil everything down within an ATS section to give each section a value that could then be used to determine a correlation to water.  After playing with this for a bit and not having very much luck I put the project down and walked away from it for a little bit, overnight in fact.  

During that time I wondered, why not just calculate the distance to the water bodies directly from each LHR polygon?  The result of this is the reason for this post...

The map shows some pretty good alignment between major waterways and sites of higher importance.  This is what we wanted to see.  We do see a lot of possible sites as we move further away from water, as well as many areas along the water that have no sites at all.  It is clear that although water correlates highly with the presence of important sites, there is much more at play.

Thank you for stopping by and participating in a great understanding of relationships in the real world.

Keith