In the mid-Holocene (5000 - 3000 cal B.P.), Native American groups constructed shell rings, a type of circular midden, in coastal areas of the American Southeast. These deposits provide important insights into Native American socioeconomic organization but are also quite rare: only about 50 such rings have been documented to date. Recent work using automated LiDAR analysis demonstrates that many more shell rings likely exist than are currently recorded in state archaeological databases. Here, we use deep learning, a form of machine intelligence, to detect shell ring deposits and identify their geographic range in LiDAR data from South Carolina. We corroborate our results using synthetic aperture radar (SAR), multispectral data, and a random forest analysis. We conclude that a greater number of shell rings exist and that their distribution expanded further north than currently documented. Our evidence suggests that ring-construction was a more widespread and common practice during the mid-Holocene.

在全新世中期（5000 - 3000 cal BP），美洲原住民团体在美国东南部的沿海地区建造了一种圆形的贝壳环。这些矿床提供了对美洲原住民社会经济组织的重要见解，但也非常罕见：迄今为止只有大约 50 个这样的环被记录在案。最近使用自动 LiDAR 分析的工作表明，可能存在的贝壳环比目前国家考古数据库中记录的多得多。在这里，我们使用深度学习（一种机器智能形式）来检测贝壳环沉积物并在来自南卡罗来纳州的 LiDAR 数据中识别其地理范围。我们使用合成孔径雷达 (SAR)、多光谱数据和随机森林分析来证实我们的结果。我们得出结论，存在更多数量的壳环，并且它们的分布比目前记录的更北。我们的证据表明，在全新世中期，环形构造是一种更为普遍和普遍的做法。