Incorporating Vegetation Reconstruction in Computational Landscape Archaeoacoustics: An Ancient Maya Case Study

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeoacoustics: Sound, Hearing, and Experience in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Ancient Maya perceived settlements as *kahkab, or “populated earth”; that is, urban agrarian places where residences intermixed with gardens and orchards. In previous work, we simulated the late eighth- and early ninth-century landscape of the ancient Maya city of Copán to investigate multisensory experience. Building on this work, we now refine the landscape reconstruction to explore the impacts of vegetation on what was seen and heard through the incorporation of paleoenvironmental data, ethnobotanical data, and remote sensing. Using the Variable Cover Type Soundshed Analysis tool in the Archaeoacoustics GIS toolbox, we perform computational analysis to generate soundsheds and a digital surface model to generate viewsheds for several of Copán’s valley stelae, exploring how vegetation may have impacted the experience of rituals conducted at these locations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Archaeoacoustics: Sound, Hearing, and Experience in Archaeology

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 31989