Mapping Agricultural Terraces on the Copacabana Peninsula, Bolivia, Tsing Multispectral Satellite Imagery

Summary

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

The Copacabana Peninsula of Lake Titicaca, in modern Bolivia and Peru, is a landscape that has been heavily modified through the construction of stone terraces on the slopes facing the shores of Lake Titicaca and the intermontane valley systems. Previous research by the Yaya-Mama Archaeological Project has demonstrated that terrace construction began during the Early Horizon period and continued through the Late Horizon occupation and represents accretional construction organized by small-scale communities united through religious ceremony and heterarchical organization. The quality of their construction is attested by the fact that many of the ancient terraces are still in use by modern Aymara communities. However, the difficult terrain, sheer scale of ancient construction, and the abandonment or destruction of the ancient terraces have prevented archaeologists from accurate measurements of the terrace system. This poster presents the results of a preliminary study using digitally mapped extant terraces from high-resolution Google Earth imagery as training data for a support vector machine learning classification of multispectral satellite imagery collected from Planet Labs. The terrace systems identified in this classification are compared with archaeological sites recorded by ground surveys to re-create networks of agricultural activity between the ancient communities of the Copacabana Peninsula.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37354.0