Land Use at the Necks of the Moche and Virú Valleys on the North Coast of 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 discusses preliminary dissertation fieldwork at Cerro Oreja and Galindo in the Moche Valley and Castillo de Tomaval in the Virú Valley. These sites were chosen for their location at the neck of each valley and their heavy occupations during the Early Intermediate Period (c. 1 CE – c. 800 CE). This location serves as an inflection point between the lower and middle valleys. Cerro Oreja’s primary occupation was during Gallinazo and Moche, but there is a later Chimú occupation at the peak. Castillo de Tomaval consists of an adobe structure and Virú and Moche occupations at the base of a ridge, as well as earlier architecture exists overlooking the castillo. Galindo was a Late Moche urban center with domestic and monumental architecture on the valley floor and the slopes of adjacent mountains. Galindo was mapped in 2017 while Cerro Oreja and Castillo de Tomaval were mapped in 2022. This fieldwork yielded orthophotos and DEMs for each site. Geospatial analyses such as viewshed, hydrology, and catchment analyses were conducted for each site and its surrounding landscape to determine similarities and differences between the two roughly contemporaneous sites (Oreja and Tomaval) and the two Moche sites (Oreja and Galindo).

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): 37561.0