Enter the Void: A GIS Analysis of the Visibility of Empty Spaces at Copan, Honduras

Summary

The concept of visibility: what or who is visible and who can see what, provides archaeologists with information about power, ideology, and interaction. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allow us to quantify the visibility of archaeological features in landscapes and 3D visualizations and gives us a way to experience these past landscapes. In Maya archaeology, most visibility studies measure the visibility of monuments as a means to understand the role of architecture within ancient Maya society. In this paper, we reverse our approach—measuring the visibility of "empty" spaces at the ancient city of Copan in Honduras—in order to interpret the role they may have played in conveying messages and shaping daily life. Using GIS we identify "empty" spaces across the city and begin to interpret their potential significance. These spaces that appear "empty" today could have been agricultural fields, household gardens, or ritual stages, which each have different implications in terms of visibility. We focus particularly at "empty" spaces in San Lucas—a neighborhood overlooking Copan’s main civic-ceremonial complex.

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

• Mind the Gap: Archaeological Approaches to Null Data Spaces   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage