Craig Rust

Research Interests: Heritage management, spatial data modelling, British Columbia archaeology, geographic information systems, human use of space, public archaeology, GIS/2, remote sensing, open source computing.

Ph.D. Research: I am incorporating new spatial and non-spatial data modelling techniques for use in archaeological site location modelling in heritage management. This research centres around integrating computational neural networks in a GIS module.  The results of this work will be trialled on a database of sites I am helping to develop, through a collaborative research project between Tla'Amin First Nation and SFU Archaeology, which are centred in the southern-central coast of British Columbia.

More information about my research is available here.

Master's Thesis: “An Agent-based Approach to Soil Erosion: An Archaeological Perspective”.

My goal for this research was to explore modelling of soil movement at an archaeological site using an agent-based modelling framework. This novel approach enabled the storage and manipulation of soil in three dimensions using implied relationships in data storage (a matrix of lists) and provided a framework to maintain attributes for every soil unit(such as soil type, cultural contents, feature association). This was all completed using the Java programming language, Recursive Porous Agent Simulation Toolkit (Repast) and Geographic Resource Analysis Support System (GRASS). The final product was trialled with data collected from Keatley Creek, a pit-house village site in southern British Columbia.

More information about this project is available here.

Past Web Projects :

   “A Journey to a New Land” (www.sfu.museum/journey)

   “A Journey into Time Immemorial” (www.sfu.museum/time)

   “Hola Canada” (www.sfu.museum/hola)