About

the author, the thesis, and project history

The project

Landuse Analyst originated as a methodological tool developed during Jason Jorgenson's PhD research at the University of Liverpool, on the impact of Early Bronze Age communities on their landscapes in the southern Levant. The thesis used the tool to model the agricultural catchment of Tell esh Shuna North, a Chalcolithic / EB I site in the northern Jordan Valley, and to ask quantitative questions about land management, environmental impact, and inter-site relationships.

The implementation now exists in three parallel forms. The first iteration was a set of BASH scripts that orchestrated GRASS GIS commands — useful as a proof of concept, awkward to grow. The thesis-era reference was a C++ desktop application using Qt, with a friendly UI for the diet → calorie → production → area cascade; that application remains the canonical implementation against which other forms are validated. A later port reworked the same methodology as a QGIS plugin to lower the barrier for users already inside a QGIS workflow. The third — this site — is a 2026 port of the same engine math to a browser, which goes beyond a static viewer to provide an interactive landscape playground. Researchers can set settlement coordinates by clicking the map, simulate environmental friction by drawing rivers/lakes with custom travel penalties, and visualize the terrain relief in 3D using custom Terrain-RGB tiles.

All three implementations share the same algorithmic core: a Tobler walking-time cost surface fed into a binary-search threshold sweep over per-item suitability rasters. The web port's engine produces results byte-identical to the C++ original on the canonical Shuna scenario (9 iterations to converge at threshold 1328.125 s, achieved area 49.14 Ha for a 50 Ha target). See the methodology page for the algorithm and the binary-search step-through. Read the methodology for the full algorithm, the data provenance for what's modelled, or the credits for attribution to the open-source projects this work is built on.

The author

Jason Jorgenson is an archaeologist and software engineer with a longstanding interest in Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age landscape archaeology in the southern Levant. His PhD, completed at the University of Liverpool, examined how the first urban-scale communities in the region modified their surrounding landscapes — and used GIS-based modelling to reconstruct alternative land-use arrangements compatible with the available archaeological evidence.

He is the original author of all three Landuse Analyst implementations — the C++/Qt thesis-era standalone, the QGIS plugin, and this web app — and maintains them alongside. C++/Qt standalone: github.com/arkygeek/landuseanalyst-classic. QGIS plugin: github.com/arkygeek/landuseanalyst. Web app: github.com/arkygeek/landuseanalyst-web.

Citation

If this tool or its methodology contributes to your research, please cite the underlying thesis:

Jorgenson, J. (2022). The Impact of South Levantine Early Bronze Age Communities On Their Landscapes. PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.

A DOI for the web application itself is pending registration via Zenodo. Once issued, this section will list the canonical software citation alongside the thesis.

Contact

General enquiries, collaboration proposals, or thesis questions: hello@arkygeek.com. If you'd like to model your own site using the methodology, the collaborators page has guidance on what to send.