GIS in Archaeology

Homework Assignment 3

Data Description Information
The basic data for this homework assignment are stored in the Mexico.mdb geodatabase stored in your GIS_In_Archaeology\Data\Mexico data folder. Use ArcCatalog and ArcMap to answer the following questions about the data sets

Questions
1. List all the feature classes that exist in the Mexico.mdb geodatabase.

2. What geographic projection are these data stored in?

3. List the attribute fields associated with the City feature class.

4. What is the length of the longest state name that could be stored in the ST_NAME field of the State feature class? Hint: this is defined by the length of this field.

5. Use ArcMap to create a basic map of Mexico from the State, Mun_Puebla (these are the municipios for the state of Puebla) and City feature classes.

6. How many Cities are mapped in this map document for the whole country of Mexico?

7. Describe at least two ways that you could find out how many cities have been mapped in a given State.

8. How many cities are mapped in just the state of Puebla?

9. Use a Select by Attribute query to find the cities of Cabo San Lucas and Cancun. What the Mexican states and population range for city?

10. Change the display projection to North America Equidistant Conic (under Projected Coordinate Systems, Continental, North America). What is the measured distance between Cancun and Cabo San Lucas?

11. Change the display projection to UTM NAD27, Zone 10N (under Projected Coordinate Systems, UTM, Nad 1927). Now what is the measured distance between Cancun and Cabo San Lucas?

12. Based on what you know about the effect of geographic projections on distance measurements, which of these measurements do you have more confidence in and why?

13. The Sites shapefile currently does not have geographic projection information associated with it. These data were collected in the UTM, NAD27, Zone 14N projection system. Use ArcToolbox to assign this coordinate system to the data and bring it into your map.

14. What is the benefit to having collected the data using a UTM coordinate system when the data are collected for a relatively small area?

15. Modify ArcMap so that it is also in UTM NAD27, Zone 14N, and zoom in on the extent of the sites shapefile (right click on the shapefile in the table of contents and select Zoom to Layer).

16. List all the municipios that contain sites recorded as part of this survey (use a Query by Location to figure this out).

17. Notice that the town of Acatzingo lies within the survey area. How many sites are there within 5 kilometers of Acatzingo?

18. There are two database files which contain information on the number of ceramics (Ceramics.dbf) and the area of each site (SiteArea.dbf). Import these data files into ArcMap, and join them to the Sites Coverage (join them based on the SiteID field in the Sites shapefile with the Site field in the Ceramics and SiteArea tables). What are the Minimum, Maximum and Mean number of ceramics recovered from sites?

19. Add a Field called CerDensity to the table (make this of type double). Fill this field with the density of sites (Ceramics.Total/SiteArea.Area). What is the Minimum, Maximum and Mean density of ceramics recovered from sites?

20. Map the sites by classifying them first by the total number of ceramics and then by the density of ceramics. Do you see any difference in the distribution of the sites with the highest values in these two maps? Explain.