Tying Sacred Places to the Landscape in Jalisco, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

People in the Tequila valleys region of Jalisco, Mexico constructed unique circular, ceremonial, monumental architecture. The public architecture has been previously argued to represent the Mesoamerican cosmos with the central altar representing a sacred mountain. I explore whether this public architecture shared in the Mesoamerican tradition of tying sacred spaces to sacred places on the landscape through the construction of sightlines towards prominent elevations on the landscape. I conduct a series of GIS viewshed analyses to look for common mountain features shared by two or more sites located in different areas of the Tequila valleys. I then tested the results of my analyses to look for statistically significant patterns in the direction of orientations towards mountains, distance from mountains to sites, and number of orientations per site. The aim of this study is to provide a preliminary assessment of whether certain alignments predicted by evidence elsewhere in Mesoamerica may be ruled out in this region of Jalisco.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26100