Los Antepasados Eran Más Valientes: Ancient and Modern Movement in the Sierra Sur Mountains

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

People living in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountains still travel largely on foot, especially where cars are impossible or when they are moving their livestock from one place to another. Prior to the widespread ownership of cars today, travel by foot was even more common and was the only mode of transportation in the prehispanic era. However, the Least Cost Path (LCP) analyses we use to model travel both in the present and the past fail to capture how people move through mountain landscapes because of built-in biases against high elevations. In this paper, I discuss the preliminary results of a recent ethnographic study in which participants from three local Sierra Sur communities guided me on trips to different locations on the landscape. During these trips, I interviewed each participant about their experiences living in and moving through mountain landscapes while also recording spatial data about these journeys with a GPS unit. Together, the qualitative and quantitative data provide a more holistic picture of movement in mountain landscapes. Aside from documenting rural people’s experiences of mountains, these results will be used to generate improved LCP analyses for modeling travel in mountains that then can be used by archaeologists globally.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part II   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37254.0