Thirty Years Later. Revisiting the Tarascan City of Las Milpillas and Its Environment, Malpaís de Zacapu, Michoacán

Summary

Thirty years ago, investigations in the city of Las Milpillas in the Malpaís of Zacapu, provided unprecedented insights on the origins of Late Postclassic tarascan social organization. One was the highlighting of a unique kind of urban organization upon lava flows ; as in all four tarascan cities of the Malpaís. Yet, unlike its counterparts, Las Milpillas specificity resides in the fact that a site portion lies upon older volcanics, providing arable lands at hand for the city dwellers to use. Today, newly acquired LiDAR imagery covering the entire city and its environment brought the research to a new scale and raises several important questions regarding the management of agrarian resources and their appeal for human settlers through time.

In this work, we revisit Las Milpillas integration in its volcanic environment in light of the LiDAR imagery. We first present the methods implemented to extract data from the LiDAR derived DEM, and compare the results with the 1980's alidade field mapping. We then assess the human effort undertaken to take advantage of the environment in view of the numerous agrarian features brought to light. We finally discuss the potentiality of dating areas on the basis of human-modified landscape features.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20084