Katharine Williams
Indigenous Data include maps of ancestral landscapes. LiDAR has been widely embraced by archaeologists because it allows for visualization and examination of bare earth landscapes, thus often significantly reducing the time and costs required for preliminary site location and identification processes. However, this level of access and exposure of ancestral landscapes is a double-edged sword, wherein entire regions are now available for archaeological inquiry without direct conversation or engagement with communities on the ground. This talk examines intersections between geospatial archaeology, particularly in terms of publicly accessible datasets in the United States, and Indigenous Data Sovereignty, even as the logistics of enforcing data governance are increasingly challenging with the rapid production of high resolution spatial datasets.