In 1991 Robert E. Dewar proposed a new type of archaeological survey model that moved away from interpreting the presence of archaeological material at a site to mean that the site was occupied for the entire length of the material's period of use. The Dewar model stated that it is more meaningful to consider the collection of sites as a whole and then to make estimates from this perspective. Typically, the archaeoligists wants to find out about population densities, how they change through time and across space. In some cases, running existing settlement data through the Dewar model produces very different (and often much lower) estimates than are produced by more standard and widely used models.
This app is an adaption of a web service implementation of the Dewar model that I wrote while a student of the MPhil in Archaeology programme at the University of Cambridge in 2010-2011 under the guidance of Dr Cameron Petrie. It was Cameron's idea to run data gathered by Rafique Mughal during his 1974-7 extensive settlement survey of the region of Cholistan in India/Pakistan through the Dewar model. I originally wrote the web service and accompanying web site using ASP.NET. This current site is built as a JavaScript client-side app.