13  Maps

13.1 Map of Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks

As part of the Humanhood in the Organ Mountains: Prehistory temporary exhibit, Craig was asked to prepare a map illustrating the location of the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument. Craig generated the map using QGIS (Figure 13.1).

Figure 13.1: Map of Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument generated by QGIS.

13.2 Maps of Maize Dates

As part of the Humanhood in the Organ Mountains: Prehistory temporary exhibit, initial plans were to represent the spread of maize into the Southwest via a reproduction from Huber (2005). Unfortunately, this reproduction was of poor quality and (unsurprisingly) did not print well in large format (Figure 13.2). Therefore, Craig set out to produce a better map to depict the spread of early maize in the Southwest. First, Craig reached out to local colleagues requesting regional site locations and maize dates. However, this did not turn up a meaningful sample of information. Craig consulted the Ancient Maize Map, but was not able to scrape coordinate data from this source.

Figure 13.2: Proposed map reproduced from Huber (2005).

Next, Craig consulted the p3k14c.org database which contained both dates and site locations. While site locations were relatively coarse, they were suitable for the mapping purposes. Impressively, the p3k14c data set consists of more than 180,000 radiocarbon dates and contains a suitable sample of sites with dated maize cobs and coordinates (Bird et al. 2022). These dates were then calibrated with the IntCal20 Northern Hemisphere curve (Reimer et al. 2020) using the rcarbon R library (Crema and Bevan 2021). Once gathered and calibrated, the sites and corresponding dates were laid out using QGIS (Figure 13.3).

Figure 13.3: Screen shot showing map of select archaeological sites in the Southwest with early maize.

QGIS is a fine tool and offers many advantages, particularly in terms of analytical transformations. Specifically, QGIS and R offer what has been described as “reproducible GIS” (Hurvitz 2021). However, QGIS remains lacking when it comes to map layout and label placement. Hopefully these functions will improve in subsequent versions.