Multimodal Mapping at Cerro San Isidro, Nepeña Valley, Peru

Summary

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

This poster presents the preliminary results of multimodal mapping efforts at Cerro San Isidro, a multicomponent archaeological complex located in the Moro region of the middle Nepeña Valley, north-central coast of Peru. Based on its size and strategic location on a natural promontory overlooking the confluence of the Loco and Nepeña rivers, the site is interpreted as one of the most important ancient human centers in Moro. In June and July 2022, our team incorporated Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), Ground-penetrating Radar (GPR), and pedestrian surveys in combination with excavations in an effort to document spatial, architectural, and material arrangements at Cerro San Isidro and its vicinity. Excavations and GPR surveys inform on the anthropogenic transformation of the settlement from a “natural” geological formation to a complex of terraced platforms and architectural compounds. Multimodal fieldwork also brings preliminary data on accessways and movement across the site and between its different sectors. Finally, pedestrian and GPR surveys in adjacent cultivated fields confirm the vast extent of the archaeological complex, far beyond the boundaries noted by past studies. In combination, the various methods deployed in 2022 provide powerful and variegated insights into the spatial organization of Cerro San Isidro.

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): 37134.0