Hopi Ancestral Lands GIS Solutions for Travel, 3D Visualization, and Change through Time

University of Redlands


Archaeological Hopi Sites	AD 1100—Relatively few sites were occupied in the region, but a large number of sites ring its periphery.	AD 1300—Many peripheral areas had been abandoned, and many of their occupants had moved into the Hopi region to found new villages.

AD 1500—The population in the Hopi region had consolidated into fewer, larger villages, leaving a core settled area surrounded by a large tract of unoccupied land.	Tsakpahu Village	3D Model of Tsakpahu Village

Redlands, California, USA

By Stephen Norris

Contact: Stephen Norris; University of Redlands
Software: ArcGIS Desktop, Adobe Illustrator, SketchUp
Printer: HP Designjet 1055cm
Data Source(s): Esri, USGS, Azsite, Professor Wesley Bernardini

The University of Redlands and the Hopi Tribe have collaborated to identify ancestral sites and to reconstruct clan migration patterns. Professor Wesley Bernardini, Ph.D., defined the primary goals for the project: to develop a GIS database for storage and analysis of spatial data on ancestral Hopi villages, to use travel times to evaluate relationships among villages, and to build 3D reconstructions of individual villages.

Cost Path Analysis
A cost path analysis calculates travel time that accounts for the difficulty of crossing different kinds of terrain. The cost path displays a line of travel that accounts for the least cost based on a cost surface input. This cost surface is a reclassification of percentage of slope into time in the seconds it takes to cross a given cell (30 meters in this case). The cost distance surface is the accumulation of time radiating from a specified location.

3D Visualization
Georeferenced room and building footprints were imported into ArcScene software along with USGS elevation data and Terraserver satellite imagery (view A, bottom center) to create a 3D visualization of a Hopi village. Balloon photos were draped over the elevation (view A, bottom right) to provide more realistic details. The polygons that make up the rooms were extruded in the layer properties and enhanced in SketchUp, giving it a three-dimensional representation.

Time
Plotting the sequence of ancestral Hopi villages as they were founded and abandoned was the first step in demographic reconstruction toward understanding how populations came together to form the Hopi. A village database was used to map the locations of villages over time. Part of the archaeological information consisted of periods of human occupation for each village: AD 1100, AD 1300, and AD 1500. These results show the growth and movement of the Hopi population using three sequential time snapshots.

Courtesy of Professor Wesley Bernardini, Ph.D.

Industry Maps

< Previous | Next >