Conclusion

The application of a GIS and the Least Cost Path algorithm to identify prehispanic roads offers a structured but flexible approachto Prehispanic road locations that could become an innovative cost-efficient technique for archaeological studies.

Archaeology and GIS Cost Path Analysis has potential to be:

a predictive model for prehispanic road locations
a cost efficient method for surveying
an excellent method to better understand regional interactions in terms of trade and communication.
an excellent method to better understand local site (intra-site) communication and formation of social space
Route determination using GIS analysis vs. traditional archaeological reliance on ethnohistorical documents describing routes.

Limitations:

Reliance on a large amounts of spatial data.
Issues of data availability
Issues of scale (finer spatial resolution vs. coarse spatial resolution). At the resolution that these rasters were resampled, their file size was rather large requiring large storage for management and processing of data.
Relieance of a very fine resolution DEM to better model movement of people in small spaces. The LORE LPB project will soon obtain LIDAR (less 0.25 cm resolution) from which a DEM will be derived for the entire site.

Strengths:

It can be compared and weighted to produce alternative routes.
This analysis can be use as a method to connect prehispanic roads that only exist in a fragmentary form due to different levels of conservation within the archaeological record. During the 2011 archaeological field season, we will be conducting an accuracy assessment to corroborate the existence of these trails, routes, and roads at the local level (intra-site) analysis.