Analyzing landform patterns in the monumental landscape of the northern Great Lakes, 1200-1600Â CE

Monuments create permanent and predictable contexts and so they offered a particularly powerful way for past societies to reconfigure their landscapes in response to variable social and ecological factors. We examine the monumental landscape of the Late Precontact (ca. 1200-1600 CE) northern Great Lakes using a longstanding tool of landscape archaeology, Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In line with the growing recognition of the need to move beyond point-to-point GIS analyses to realize dynamic insights into past landscapes, we turned to multivariate total landscape geospatial modeling increasingly common in ecology. Specifically, we used a total landscape model of landforms-a compound, stable, and archaeologically relevant measure of landscape heterogeneity. We conducted a multi-scalar computation of Shannon's equitability to assess landform diversity in terms of both abundance and evenness and examined the positioning of monumental earthwork enclosures across north-central Michigan in relation to this measure. We found enclosures were non-randomly located in areas with high landform abundance and evenness, a nuanced positioning that patterned regionally but also relied on detailed, local socioecological knowledge. The positioning of earthwork enclosures in areas of increased landform diversity was one way indigenous communities crafted a monumental landscape to navigate the restricted social, economic, and ideological setting of Late Precontact (ca. 1200-1600 CE). Our study offers one example of the ways archaeologists can harness the power of geospatial technologies to gain insight into the variegated landscapes people inhabited in the past-places that were composed of ecology, other peoples, non-human beings and the constant flow of interactions between them.