Friends in High Places: Windes, Shrines, and Lines of Sight

Summary

In the 1970s, Tom Windes began documenting shrines and stone circles around Chaco Canyon. Decades before landscape archaeologists spoke of viewsheds, Tom recognized the significance of visibility at Chaco. He observed that J-shaped Windes’ shrines create intervisible connections among great houses, and he pointed out that stone circles in Chaco are always within sight of one or more great kivas. Today, GIS is a useful tool for examining intervisibility across large areas. Inspired by Tom, and utilizing data he collected and graciously shared, we employ GIS line of sight and viewshed analyses to assess intervisibility among great houses, shrines, stone circles, herraduras, and high places across the Chacoan world. As Tom originally postulated, we demonstrate that shrines on high places create a network of intervisible connections linking outlier communities and landforms. It is possible that the boundaries of Chaco are defined in some sense by intervisibility.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Its About Time: Contributions in Honor of Thomas C. Windes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage