Spatial Distribution of Archaeological Sites in Loralai District, Balochistan, Pakistan Based on Geographic Information System (GIS)

Abstract

Loralai hosts a number of archaeological sites and is considered an important area, where a concentration of prehistoric archaeological sites was noted in previous research.  For this purpose, the GIS spatial analysis methods, such as Buffer, K-means clustering and heat map, were used to understand the distribution of archaeological sites in the landscape. The initial result obtained from GIS and ground surveys in 2020, 2021, and 2022 indicated that the prehistoric people wisely resided in those places of the landscape where they found water and fertile land. The paper shows that natural factors were the reason behind the distribution of archaeological sites in the study area.