Wayfinding: Paths, Pathway Markers, and Navigational Monuments at Wari Camp and Beyond

Summary

Social life never proceeds in the absence of a spatial dimension that defines, brackets, segregates, alters or otherwise organizes interaction. The power to organize space emerges historically from the sweep of institutional arrangements across society and operates along many different dimensions and scales, at once establishing boundaries all the while insidiously permeating them. This historical process – this "social production of space" – is what we refer to as landscape. Landscape has been a foundational concept for research at the Programme for Belize site of Wari Camp for almost 15 years. We have explored how the spaces of social life there facilitated control by political leaders over a diverse array of people and landforms, and how people through their various institutional affiliations devised a multiplicity of provisioning strategies. Yet only recently have we begun to detect the manner in which people and things moved within and among these spaces. Our paper celebrating the 25th anniversary of research at Programme for Belize tackles this particular dimension of place making. We focus on the identification of paths, pathway markers and navigational monuments because their distributional patterning provides unexpected insights into both community and regional landscapes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Polities, Hinterland Communities, and Everything in Between: Twenty-Five Years of Archaeological Research in Northwest Belize   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15514