cluesgeography

Cluesgeography is an interdisciplinary field that studies how spatial clues—evidence embedded in the physical environment, landscapes, and geospatial records—can be used to infer processes, patterns, and histories across space and time. The term emphasizes evidentiary inference, akin to following clues in a geographic puzzle to reconstruct past events, environmental changes, or contemporary dynamics. Core concepts include trace, marker, and signature: trace refers to any remaining feature that bears information about a process; markers are identifiable objects or features; signatures are holistic patterns that reveal underlying mechanisms.

Researchers in cluesgeography employ a range of methods: field surveys, GIS-based analysis, remote sensing, lidar, sediment and artifact analysis, and probabilistic modeling to assess uncertainty. Data are drawn from satellite imagery, aerial photography, historical maps, topographic data, and field observations. The approach is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on geography, archaeology, environmental science, criminology, and history.

Applications include archaeology and cultural heritage research, environmental forensics, land-use planning, disaster risk assessment, and conservation planning. For example, clue-driven mapping can help locate buried waterways, reconstruct ancient settlement layouts, or identify erosion patterns that signal land degradation.

Challenges include dealing with incomplete records, ambiguity in interpreting clues, scale dependence, and the risk of overfitting models to noisy data. Proponents argue that cluesgeography offers a transparent framework for presenting uncertainty and for integrating multiple lines of evidence.

See also: forensic geography, landscape archaeology, historical geography, geospatial analysis.