Merchants and Muleteers: A GIS Approach to Movement in the Eighteenth-Century Andes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

“El Lazarillo de Ciegos Caminantes” (1775) describes the colonial highway from Buenos Aires to Lima. Authored by a Spanish official, Alonso Carrió de la Vandera, the document records a uniquely elite experience of travel. The author describes a journey taken from Buenos Aires to Lima structured by the posta, a colonial system of lodging and transport infrastructure. Along the same route, historical and archaeological evidence suggests that laborers and herders moved more slowly and often spent the night in ephemeral campsites. This paper presents a GIS reconstruction of the route, alongside elevation based models of horseback and pedestrian travel along it, to argue that the rhythms of movement and rest along it were structured by a traveler’s class identity. The colonial elite’s view of how travelers should move along roads, traveling on horse or mule between comfortable overnight accommodations, contrasts strongly with how laborers most likely experienced them—as places of arduously slow movement and comparatively plain lodgings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36853.0