Finding Terraces in the Lake Titicaca Basin Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Driving through the Lake Titicaca basin of southern Peru travelers are often struck by terrace covered hillsides rising from the plain. Nearly every hillside encountered has been transformed from steep faced rocky hillsides into arable land. These ancient fields were constructed and farmed millennia ago to help farmers adapt to the high-altitude, arid ecosystem, an ever-oscillating climate, and dynamic cultural regimes. However, very little is known about the extent of these terraces, when they were built, or who built them. The vast extent might be one of the reasons why terraces have not been systematically studied in the region. In this paper, we discuss producing an integrative GIS database to (1) locate and examine the extent of agricultural terrace complexes, (2) associate terrace complexes with known archaeological sites, and (3) characterize terrace typologies as visible from satellite data. Remote sensing allows us to quantify and characterize terraces in a way that is not possible from terrestrial survey methods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32364