Archaeological spatial analysis and GIS in a small fortification: Ephemeral occupations along the border during the ‘Conquest of Desert’ process in Argentinean Pampas (19th Century)

Abstract

In the following paper we formulate an interpretation about how the space was managed inside a classic ‘Fortín’ a sort of small fort, which was located in the Argentinean Pampas during the 1860–1870's period. We review the main features of these sites, like the nature of its structures and buildings or the quick abandonment of military positions due to the advancing process in the frontier. As a case study, Fortín Otamendi site is a large area (> 2600 sq. m) divided in several sectors where we had detected and confirmed different scatterings of heterogeneous archaeological remains (e.g. fauna, lithics, metals, glasses…), both in the site and its proximities. Analytical steps in this research on spatial distributions have been developed from free GIS platform (QGIS) and geostatistical methods. Our aims are to establish an efficient fieldwork, to quantify and characterize spatial distributions, and –according the results obtained– to solve the problem related with building potential locations, for which we have estimated the probability of a structure location in terms of subareas with significantly low-density distributions of remains.