Mapping Tasmania's cultural landscapes: using habitat suitability modelling of archaeological sites as a landscape history tool

Aim: Understanding past distributions of people across the landscape is key to understanding how people used, affected and related to the natural environment. Here we use habitat suitability modelling to represent the landscape distribution of Tasmanian Aboriginal archaeological sites and assess the implications for patterns of past human activity.

Location: Tasmania, Australia

Methods: We developed a RandomForest ‘habitat suitability' model of site records in the Tasmanian Aboriginal Heritage Register. We applied a best-effort bias correction, considered 31 predictor variables relating to climate, topography and resource proximity, and used a variable selection procedure to optimise the final model. Model uncertainty was assessed via bootstrapping and we ran an analogous MAXENT model as a cross-validation exercise.

Results: The results from the RandomForest and MAXENT models are highly congruent. The strongest environmental predictors of site occurrence include distance to co...