City of Today, City of the Past: Permanencies of the Acequias’ Cultural Landscape in the Urban Pattern of San Antonio, Texas

Angela Lombardi

City of Today, City of the Past: Permanencies of the Acequias’ Cultural Landscape in the Urban Pattern of San Antonio, Texas

Year: 2017

Summary

In the Southwest of United States, San Antonio, Texas is a urban center of high cultural significance characterized by a ‘historic urban landscape’, whose morphology was generated by Spanish colonial exploitation patterns, such as the 18th century agricultural irrigation system of ‘acequias’ developed along the San Antonio river.

This study demonstrates how contemporary urban form can be interpreted as a palimpsest, with material memory embedded in the city, it develops mapping visualization created through comparative analysis of historical maps, archival documents and archaeological investigations reports and, it provides effective methodological tools for supporting the process of recovery and reconciliation of the historic acequia landscape.

Although the whole acequias network is characterized today by different levels of integrity, the identification of the boundaries of Spanish colonial landscape, together with assessments of its changes overtime, are instruments to be used for identifying archaeological potentials and developing urban conservation strategies both for UNESCO buffer zone and Bexar County cultural landscape.

Cite this Record

City of Today, City of the Past: Permanencies of the Acequias’ Cultural Landscape in the Urban Pattern of San Antonio, Texas. Angela Lombardi. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Fort Worth, TX. 2017 ( tDAR id: 435241)