Dingcun Site Group (DSG) is the first Palaeolithic site group independently excavated by Chinese archaeologists. Over decades of fieldwork, human teeth, a parietal bone fragment, numerous stone artefacts, and animal fossils have been recovered. Some scholars suggest that the entire southern Linfen Basin (~5000 km²) served as the subsistence region of the DSG population, yet documented localities are limited to an area of approximately 50 km² in the north-central basin. There is a gap between the limited budget and the conduct of basin-level surveys. Traditional field surveys are costly in terms of time, manpower and funding. Therefore, this study aims to predict potential DSG localities within the Linfen Basin using spatial statistical modelling, providing a reference for future large-scale archaeological surveys.
The modelling process requires landscape data of the Linfen Basin and information on DSG localities. The landscape data includes a digital elevation model, geological, vegetation and hydrological data. These data are obtained from the online open-source database. Locality information is summarised from published literature.
The methodology is to calculate the probability of the locality presence at each pixel using multivariate logistic regression and raster map algebra and to construct a predictive distribution map for the basin. The analyses will be carried out using GRASS GIS and R. GRASS GIS will be used to analyse the locality's spatial relationships and prepare rasters. R and packages (including maptools, raster, spatstat, and rgdal) will be used for the construction of model expressions and the prediction surfaces.
The resulting DSG distribution map reveals a high locality concentration, indicating significant potential for discovering new localities in the basin. This study and future field surveys are expected to yield new insights into the spatial dynamics and interactions between populations and landscapes during the Middle to Late Pleistocene in northern China and East Asia.