Finding karstic caves and rockshelters in the Inner Asian mountain corridor using predictive modelling and field survey
Cuthbertson P. Ullmann T. Büdel C. Varis A. Namen A. Seltmann R. Reed D. Taimagambetov Z. Iovita R.
January 2021Public Library of Science
PLoS ONE
2021#16Issue 1 January
The area of the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor (IAMC) follows the foothills and piedmont zones around the northern limits of Asia’s interior mountains, connecting two important areas for human evolution: the Fergana valley and the Siberian Altai. Prior research has suggested the IAMC may have provided an area of connected refugia from harsh climates during the Pleistocene. To date, this region contains very few secure, dateable Pleistocene sites, but its widely available carbonate units present an opportunity for discovering cave sites, which generally preserve longer sequences and organic remains. Here we present two models for predicting karstic cave and rockshelter features in the Kazakh portion of the IAMC. The 2018 model used a combination of lithological data and unsupervised landform classification, while the 2019 model used feature locations from the results of our 2017–2018 field surveys in a supervised classification using a minimum-distance classifier and morphometric features derived from the ASTER digital elevation model (DEM). We present the results of two seasons of survey using two iterations of the karstic cave models (2018 and 2019), and evaluate their performance during survey. In total, we identified 105 cave and rockshelter features from 2017–2019. We conclude that this model-led approach significantly reduces the target area for foot survey. Copyright:
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Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
Institute of Geography and Geology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
Institute for Archaeological Sciences (INA), Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
Faculty of History, Archaeology, and Ethnology, Department of Archaeology, Ethnology, and Museology, Al Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty, Kazakhstan
Department of Earth Sciences, Centre for Russian and Central EurAsian Mineral Studies, Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom
Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin, United States
National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan
Department of Anthropology, Center for the Study of Human Origins, New York University, New York, United States
Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology
Institute of Geography and Geology
Institute for Archaeological Sciences (INA)
Faculty of History
Department of Earth Sciences
Department of Anthropology
National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan
Department of Anthropology
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