| Title | Archaeologists and Geographers Team to Predict Locations of Ancient Buddhist Sites | |
| Date | Saturday May 28 2016, @08:13AM | |
| Author | cmn32480 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the edumacated-guesses dept. | ||
For archaeologists and historians interested in the ancient politics, religion and language of the Indian subcontinent, two UCLA professors and their student researchers have creatively pinpointed sites that are likely to yield valuable transcriptions of the proclamations of Ashoka, the Buddhist king of northern India's Mauryan Dynasty who ruled from 304 B.C. to 232 B.C.
In a study published this week in Current Science, archaeologist Monica Smith and geographer Thomas Gillespie identified 121 possible locations of what are known as Ashoka's "edicts."
First they isolated shared features of 29 known locations of Ashokan edicts, which were found carved into natural rock formations in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. They then harnessed species-distribution modeling tactics—which includes examining sophisticated geographic information systems datasets along with Google Earth images—to overlay those unique characteristics against a geological and population map of ancient India. They believe they have identified locations that hold the same characteristics as proven sites and are significantly accurate markers for future discovery.
Sounds like data-driven archaeology is the wave of the future.
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printed from SoylentNews, Archaeologists and Geographers Team to Predict Locations of Ancient Buddhist Sites on 2024-04-25 11:47:20