How to Characterize in visu Mountains' Shape and Its Significance in Inca Culture?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Developments and Challenges in Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Beyond geomorphology, mountains are complex cultural entities. In Inca culture, they embodied powerful social agents, wak’as, and constituted meaningful places in the territories that composed the empire. Early colonial chronicles, as well as ethnological heritages, offer abundant data and analogies on mountains' cultural significance, but archaeological evidence is scarcer. It mainly consists of capacochas sacrifice remains on very high-altitude summits, of rare examples of miniature representation, and of the architectural devices of mountains scenification (e.g., a window and/or the site location) and their common association to astronomical phenomena. Researching how mountains appear from these devices can allow us to assess if certain summits' characteristics were especially significant in Inca culture, as stated in some chronicles. This talk will present a 3D modeling approach to characterize and statistically compare summits’ in visu appearance and relation with astronomical events. This approach, based on horizontal visualization and measurement of a digital terrain model, is applied to the study of Vilcabamba Cordillera, a mountain range close to Cuzco, whose impressive density of snow-capped peaks may have played a significant role in the selection of this region for the implantation of royal estates instead of its planning as a classical imperial province.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Developments and Challenges in Landscape Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39201.0