Casey Barrier
Bryn Mawr College, PA·Social Science
How did one of the first cities in what is now the United States come together? In little more than a century, an Indigenous center in the Midcontinent, in present-day Illinois, attracted many immigrants and became the largest precolonial community in North America.
- Fields
Social Science
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
archaeology
anthropology
early urbanism
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Conduct a high-resolution magnetometry survey of more than 5.5 square kilometers of a precolonial Indigenous city to map buried features across nearly the entire site.
- Combine the magnetometer data with GIS and geospatial analyses to reconstruct how the urban landscape grew and was organized, and compare it with other early cities worldwide.
- Build a digital atlas of the buried landscape, shared via tDAR and a web portal, with stewardship shared with Tribal Historic Preservation Officers and preservation agencies.
More about the research
Yet even after decades of fieldwork, basic facts about how it grew and was organized remain unclear. Understanding early urbanism requires large-scale maps of how such places developed, and most of this city lies buried.
Why it matters
The first site-wide map of this buried city will show how Indigenous peoples came together to form North America's largest precolonial community. It will give site managers data for planning at a place visited by about a quarter-million people each year. Tribal stakeholders gain shared stewardship of the data. The digital atlas is intended to support future fieldwork, theses, and projects in which middle and high school students learn GIS.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Edward Henry
Colorado State University-Fort Collins, CO·Social Science
Map the buried landscape of an early North American city across more than 5.5 square kilometers, using high-resolution magnetometry that detects buried features without excavation.
Daniel Miller Runfola
William & Mary, VA·Social Science
Automate processing of administrative boundary data for the geoBoundaries platform, including georeferencing printed maps from library archives so historical borders can be placed on modern coordinates.
Ming Xiao
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Engineering
Establish ground- and drone-based monitoring of permafrost change on Alaska's North Slope, and combine it with satellite remote sensing and image processing to track erosion and subsidence.
The school
Bryn Mawr College: 1 labs on PI Pages, $6M a year on research, 9 research doctorates a year.
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