Tracing Traffic: Network Analysis and Modelling of Pedestrian Urban Roads in Angamuco, Michoacan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Michoacán and West Mexico: New Research in Interaction, Exchange, and Mobility" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Movement is a fundamental component of social development and cultural complexity, especially in urban centers. It is defined by its road-network that permits or restricts access and flow to certain areas of a city. However, it is pedestrians who use this network by creating routes depending on a multitude of factors and decisions including personal experiences, group traditions, or physical characteristics of the network (e.g., blockages, access points, quality of the road, etc.). How can archaeologists trace aggregates of these decisions? Is it possible to identify the most used routes, major roads or important destinations? In this paper I propose a method to model traffic flow in the ancient city of Angamuco, Michoacan (250 to 1530 CE). I used urban network analyses and modeling (along with data from survey and field mapping) to identify the major roads (most trafficked) from a complex network of over 3,000 pedestrian road segments and nodes in this 5 km2 city. Results suggest that when studying mobility, we need to move away from thinking of roads as limited features with start and end and see them as components of a network in which people engage, use, and transform daily.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Michoacán and West Mexico: New Research in Interaction, Exchange, and Mobility   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52334