Post-Tiwanaku Settlement Patterns in the Peaceful Coastal Osmore Valley and the Tense Upper Valleys

Author(s): Bruce Owen

Year: 2015

Summary

Some refugees from the collapsing Tiwanaku province in Moquegua settled in the coastal Osmore valley, where they appear to have integrated peacefully with the Chiribaya population, living in seemingly undefended settlements closely intermixed with their ethnically distinct neighbors. Others moved into the upper valleys of the Osmore drainage, where they apparently experienced a competitive, fearful social environment, living on defensible high points, some with vestiges of what may have been circumvallating walls. Building on recent analyses of settlement patterns associated with peace and conflict, this study tests and explores the contrasting "war and peace" interpretations in the two portions of the Osmore valley through a variety of GIS-based settlement-pattern analyses of full-coverage survey data using measures of topgraphic defensibility, site spacing and clustering, size distributions, viewsheds and intervisibility, access to water, catchments, and other approaches. The results can be compared to other periods and regions in assessing social conditions on a scale of tranquility to tension based on settlement data.

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Cite this Record

Post-Tiwanaku Settlement Patterns in the Peaceful Coastal Osmore Valley and the Tense Upper Valleys. Bruce Owen. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396868)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

min long: -93.691; min lat: -56.945 ; max long: -31.113; max lat: 18.48 ;