A GIS of Movement and Sensory Experience at a Planned Colonial Town in Highland Peru

Summary

GIS in archaeology has diversified beyond its origins as a map-and-database and predictive modeling tool to explore multidimensional views of human experience in the past. This paper combines models of movement and visibility at the scale of a single settlement to render an approximation of sensory experience within the built environment of a planned colonial town in highland Peru. In the 1570s, some 1.5 million native Andeans were forcibly resettled to “reduction towns” (reducciones) based on a theory of the built environment: that compact settlements built around central churches and plazas would generate properly civilized, Christian subjects and communities. The relict reducción of Santa Cruz de Tuti of highland Peru is exceptional in its architectural preservation, enabling modeling of visual and kinetic aspects of dwelling in one of these towns. Specifically, traffic density maps derived from spatial network analyses are used to distribute observers in a high resolution, site-level cumulative viewshed analysis, thus integrating a model of aggregate movement with visibility density estimates. The results point to the centrality and visual prominence not only of the site’s church and plaza, but of indigenous elite households and the Inkaic ritual spaces that were incorporated within the core of the reducción.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Methodological Tool or Paradigm Shifter? Assessing the Status of GIS in Archaeological Research

Keywords

Spatial Coverage