Digital and Computational Methodologies for Masonry Typologies: A Quantitative Approach to Structure Classification in the Colca Valley, Peru

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists have long used architectural energetics to better understand the relationships between labor organization, political power, and materiality in pre-modern societies. The 16th century Spanish invasion of the Andes caused unprecedented societal upheaval and, in the 1580s, the physical upheaval of people as the Toledan reducción system resettled communities into concentrated towns. It remains largely unclear how architectural production practices changed throughout this period despite scholastic attention to architecture features and building forms overall. Addressing production practices requires detailed regional masonry typologies such that labor-time estimates for sites and for individual structures can be calculated and compared. This study aims to systematize masonry typologies through the quantification of masonry features in the Colca Valley of southern Peru. It builds on existing descriptive research by utilizing photogrammetric and 3D models of various building types to extract wall feature data at ten sites. Using metric features including stone sizes and counts per surface area, rectangularity, gap area, and angularity allows for more systematized identification of masonry types, especially in areas where unevenly coursed walls are common and complicate qualitative characterizations. Ultimately, a more robust typology will allow the authors to generate more nuanced energetics estimates across a variety of sites and structures.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39778.0