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J Archaeol Res (2012) 20:309–355
DOI 10.1007/s10814-012-9057-6
Recent Landscape Archaeology in South America
John H. Walker
Published online: 1 May 2012
! Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
Abstract South American archaeologists use the term landscape to analyze a
broad range of relationships. Examples include intensive agriculture and political
power, myth and place, and climate change and cultural development. Landscape
archaeology is necessarily spatial analysis, but scholars work at different scales and
use different methods. This essay highlights the influence of geography, anthropology, and new methodologies on four definitions of landscape: ecological habitat,
built environment, a stage for performance, and integrating subsistence and settlement. In a number of cases, landscape archaeologists, stakeholders, and researchers
from different traditions work at different scales to meaningfully share information,
clarify their differences, and compare their analyses and conclusions.
Keywords
Landscape ! South America ! Built environment ! Settlement patterns
Introduction
South American landscape archaeology has much to offer American archaeologists,
scholars of landscape, and ethnographers of South America. Landscape archaeology
has grown rapidly in the past decade, benefiting and suffering from the popularity of
the term. On one hand, ‘‘landscape’’ is claimed by a large and growing number of
archaeologists (David and Thomas 2008) who connect archaeology to cultural
anthropology, history, architecture, geography, and geographic information science
(GIS). This diversity makes it difficult to discern common assumptions or goals. In
South America, landscape archaeology has a specific set of meanings because of
three defining factors. First, indigenous South Americans had complex relationships
J. H. Walker (&)
Department of Anthropology, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Boulevard,
Howard Phillips Hall 309, Orlando, FL 32816-1361, USA
e-mail: john.walker@ucf.edu
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with the places where they lived (as they do today). Social actors such as trees and
burial mounds have relationships within several South American societies. A second
factor is the disciplinary youth of South American archaeology and the low density
of field projects. A multidisciplinary approach to landscape has a strong appeal
where basic terms are contentious and limited archaeological data must be
combined with historical, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic sources on the one
hand, and data from ethnobotany, faunal analysis, and climate studies on the other.
Third, the anthropology of South America has deep roots in cultural geography
(Denevan 1989, 2001). Particularly as crystallized in the Handbook of South
American Indians, South American archaeology always has struggled to relate
cultural and environmental variation (Steward 1946).
What then is a landscape? Many definitions are in use and little consensus has
been attempted or achieved. Patterson (2008) draws seven definitions of landscape
from the history of American archaeology; South American archaeologists stay
closer to some definitions than others. His explicitly historical perspective
demonstrates that although they interact, these definitions derive from distinct
philosophical, social, and national traditions. For my purpose, a landscape is the
product of interactions between communities of people and nonhuman entities that
is geographically defined and historically specific. I focus on four broad definitions,
each of which has a meaningful recent history within South American archaeology.
These include (1) landscape as an ecological habitat, (2) landscape as the built
environment, (3) landscape as a stage for performance, drawing on archaeoastronomy and ethnohistory, and (4) landscape as the integration of subsistence and
settlement, emerging from the definition of settlement pattern. Although many
projects and authors touch on several different definitions of landscape, I mention
only some of these points of overlap. Rather, I take a broad approach that discusses
the highlights of these four traditions rather than focusing only on the literature from
a single standpoint.
Landscape as an ecological habitat, a natural environment that affects or limits
human societies, is an established view in South American archaeology, stemming
from cultural geography. South American archaeologists and anthropologists have
sought to connect societies to ecological settings for at least 60 years (Lathrap 1970,
1977; Meggers 1954, 1971; Steward 1946; Steward and Faron 1959). Today,
archaeologists reexamine how societies altered those ecological settings, creating
dialectics between culture and nature, or overturning that distinction entirely.
Studies of the landscape as a built or marked environment have been very
productive. Archaeologists analyze agricultural features, geoglyphs, ring ditches,
roads, trails, and rock art to study how South Americans inscribed meaning and
power and invested labor across the entire continent. The scale of these built
environments has been apparent since the 1500s, but their explicit incorporation into
archaeological study is more recent. Their study overturns simple distinctions
between nature and culture and reveals the magnitude of indigenous achievement.
To see landscapes as stages for performance is a transformative perspective.
Building on analyses of pilgrimage and religious centers such as Pachacamac
(Figs. 1 and 2), Chavı́n de Huántar (Fig. 2), and Tiwanaku (Fig. 3), Andeanists use
this sense of landscape to ground empirical studies of architecture in a theoretical
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Fig. 1 Map of South America with areas above 1,000 m elevation, forested areas, and modern
boundaries
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Fig. 2 Area map with locations mentioned in the text in Ecuador and Peru
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Fig. 3 Area map with locations mentioned in the text in Bolivia and Peru
perspective that integrates archaeology and cultural anthropology. Landscape as a
stage is related to the study of archaeoastronomy and worldview. South American
archaeologists, archaeoastronomers, and cultural anthropologists have long studied
landscape as an Andean way to mediate earth and sky. Drawing on a long tradition
of ethnohistoric research, Andeanists have used this perspective to unravel the
threads that bind the Inca state to local communities across western South America.
In settlement pattern studies, South American archaeologists have also played a
foundational role. Willey (1953) worked in the Virú Valley on the Peruvian coast
(Fig. 2) and built an understanding of the large-scale relationship between society
and landscape based on sites and the spatial patterns between them. This perspective
and the development of associated methodologies continue today, while areas
covered by archaeological survey have expanded rapidly in the past decade. A
smaller number of South American scholars define landscape as a settlementsubsistence system and question the ‘‘site’’ as a fundamental archaeological unit.
Excellent review articles and chapters chart a number of related and overlapping
literatures. They include an incisive review of settlement archaeology from around
the world (Kowalewski 2008); comprehensive reviews of household archaeology in
the Andes (Nash 2009), the Late Intermediate period in the Andes (Covey 2008),
landscape and environment in the central Andes (Contreras 2010), and archaeoastronomy in the Americas (Aveni 2003); and a seminal essay on landscape
archaeology (Anschuetz et al. 2001). GIS in archaeology has been well analyzed in
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textbook format (Conolly and Lake 2006), and the use of spatial technology in
archaeology has been recently reviewed (McCoy and Ladefoged 2009). A useful
handbook on satellite imagery is now available (Parcak 2009). The large and
burgeoning literature on landscape in other parts of the world is not covered here
(Ashmore and Knapp 1999; Johnson 2007). Together, the recent Handbook of
Landscape Archaeology (David and Thomas 2008) and Handbook of South
American Archaeology (Silverman and Isbell 2008) place the studies highlighted
here in broader regional and theoretical contexts.
As noted in many recent bibliographic reviews, digital publication of both new
and old sources has changed library research. This is reflected in two ways. First,
literature from South America is increasingly and more widely available through
North American and European libraries and subscription services (although the
reverse is too rarely the case). Second, many social science and humanities
dissertations with original data are now available at low or no cost. Although my
essay is rooted in the North American literature, I have attempted to include both
kinds of sources. The text is accompanied by a basic set of maps, and the reader is
strongly encouraged to access an interactive satellite map, available from several
sources online. Many locations that I discuss can be viewed in considerable detail
using public-domain imagery.
I focus my review on sources published between 2000 and 2010, although some
earlier publications are included, both for background and to document particularly
productive discussions. South America is defined as the continent proper, although
some comparative cases from Central America and the Caribbean are cited. I have
selected and reviewed sources to make the case that the deepest divisions in
landscape archaeology today are reflections of creative tensions within the field. A
unified landscape archaeology is neither possible nor desirable, but sustaining
landscape archaeologies depend on open communication about practices and goals.
I conclude my review by speculating on how landscape archaeology might be
expected to change in the near future. The bibliographies mark a narrow path
through the literature from which further explorations can be made.
Landscape as a habitat
Many South American archaeologists interpret the environment as a setting or
backdrop that affects, limits, or determines cultural forms. In the Andes, where
much archaeological research has taken place, the environment is taken as a mosaic
of distinct habitats or environmental niches, arranged in a sequence from the Pacific
Ocean to the peaks of the Andes and down to the tropical forest (Troll 1966).
Cultural achievement is framed as adaptation to difficult or unpredictable
environmental conditions, often in an explicitly evolutionary framework (Meggers
1954, 1979). Andean environments have been presented as dynamic, combining
volcanism, landslides, earthquakes, and El Niño events. South American cultures
were unique because of their adaptation to this distinctive combination of steep
topography and tropical climate (Murra 1980). To study the environment was to
interpret the conditions that affect or determine the course of social evolution.
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Significant trends in ecology are beginning to affect archaeological interpretation, as
models of ecological equilibria, representing repeating places in universal cycles,
are replaced by the ‘‘discordant harmonies’’ of ecological systems that have
meaningful, individual histories (Botkin 1990; Zimmerer 1994). Archaeological
studies incorporating environmental reconstructions have multiplied into a variety
of forms with divergent understandings of the relationship between environment
and society in the pre-Columbian past (Hayashida 2005), many of which mesh with
built environment perspectives. Reformulations of archaeology as the long-term
study of systemic relationships between societies and the environment improve
upon previous interpretations and signal an opportunity for archaeology to make a
unique contribution to policy debates over conservation, land tenure, and land use.
They focus on smaller scales, and historical ecology is at the center of this effort
(Balée 2006; Balée and Erickson 2006; Crumley 1994; Crumley and Marquardt
1990; Hornborg and Crumley 2007).
Climate and geology
Climate data have been central to the debate over Andean economies, particularly
how they changed in the third millennium BC on the Peruvian coast and at the end
of the first millennium AD in the highlands. On the coast, environmental
reconstruction includes several independent lines of evidence. The relationship
between environment and society was first analyzed from a landscape perspective in
the 1980s (Richardson 1981) as a reflection of the relationship between events
outside human control and how societies reacted to them (Moseley 1975). Models of
the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon have improved (Haas and
Dillon 2003; Sandweiss and Quilter 2009), and Sandweiss and colleagues have
applied these data to the reconstruction of specific landscape histories along the
coast, including climatic shifts, resource availability, and the horizontal stratigraphy
of beach ridges produced by cycles of strong El Niño events (Sandweiss 1986;
Sandweiss et al. 2004, 2009; Sandweiss and Richardson 2008). Based on horizontal
stratigraphy of the Moquegua Valley, about 80% of the floodplain is younger than
550 years old (Fig. 2) (Manners et al. 2007). This renders any assumption about the
relationship between current and past settlement patterns problematic to say the
least. Climatic and environmental change is at the center of debates over resource
availability, maritime adaptation, and agricultural systems (Sandweiss and Richardson 2008). Recent research suggests that overexploitation of algarrobo forests,
and not only climatic changes, led to the collapse of agricultural systems
(Beresford-Jones et al. 2009). Across the Andes, indigenous people understand,
predict, and react to large-scale patterns in climate (documented through the study
of ethnoclimatology) as well as dramatic climatic events (Orlove et al. 2002).
Andean peoples were not (and are not) passive victims of environmental disasters
but have complex, culturally mediated strategies for living within a constantly
changing environment (Dillehay and Kolata 2004). Pre-Columbian climate change,
as a long-term and large-scale process, was likewise part of distinctive Andean ways
of life rather than an abstract, inflexible parameter defining human adaptation.
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For the Amazonian lowlands, Meggers continues to champion a complex line of
argument that began in the 1950s, maintaining that the environment did not and
could never sustain permanent settlements, that ethnohistoric accounts of large
settlement and complex society are unreliable, and that Amazonians did not
significantly modify the environment. In recent years, the argument has changed to
include the Amazonian refugia hypothesis and the ENSO (Meggers 1994). This
argument has revolved around the interpretation of seriation at individual sites
(DeBoer et al. 1996, 2001) and settlement patterns along the central Amazon and
the Xingu (Fig. 4) (Heckenberger et al. 1999, 2001). Meggers’ positions now appear
to be those of a determined minority; an emerging consensus incorporates a more
dialectic concept of humans and the environment (Balée 2006; Stahl 2004).
Arguments based in environmental and geographic determinism remain influential,
however, especially outside of anthropology (Diamond 2009; see also McAnany
and Yoffee 2010). Indigenous South Americans did (and do) have impressive,
encyclopedic knowledge of local environments, climates, and plant and animal
populations. The ways in which communities use local knowledge are defined by
indigenous priorities and are not easily described by theory that dwells on the largest
scales.
Remote sensing
Studies of modern environments using satellite imagery and GIS analysis are of
great relevance to landscape archaeology (Brondı́zio et al. 1994; Brondı́zio and
Siquiera 1997). Such studies proceed at several different scales and move analysis
quickly and easily between them. They generate powerful maps and documents and
provide context for policy debates at national, departmental, and local levels. In
many cases they reveal the extent of landscape modification. As satellite imagery
accumulates, greater time depth will show the importance of history, as has already
been demonstrated in sub-Saharan Africa, where forest expanded at the expense of
savanna (Fairhead and Leach 1996). Near the mouth of the Amazon, remote-sensing
analysis, in combination with the local history of landscape modification, shows the
tremendous effect a small construction can have on a large area (Raffles and
WinklerPrins 2003). The changes to the Rı́o Guariba (Fig. 4) produced by the
opening of a channel 2 m wide and 1 m deep alongside a waterfall have widened the
river mouth from 25 to 600 m, connecting a seasonal savanna to the tidal flows of
the lower Amazon. The availability of remote-sensing imagery through Google
Earth and other widely available sources makes this research more accessible to
scholars throughout the Americas.
Anthropogenic soils
The line between archaeology and soil science has nearly been erased in a series of
studies of Amazonian Dark Earth (ADE), a covering term for a variety of cultural
phenomena also called terra preta do indio, terra preta, and terra mulata (Glaser
and Woods 2004; Lehmann 2003; Woods 2008). Three recent edited volumes
describe these artificial soils, which stretch for kilometers along the main rivers of
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Fig. 4 Area map with locations mentioned in the text in Brazil and the Guyanas
the Amazon; they also are found in the interfluves and along smaller tributaries. To
define these soils, which sustained agriculture over long periods of time, requires the
archaeological record of habitation and use at those locations. ADE are clearly
artificial, and refining their definition addresses questions about whether soils were
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engineered for agricultural purposes or were the unintentional products of long-term
occupation. ADE studies establish that the main channels of the Amazon were the
settings for large, permanent occupations, suggesting that populations throughout the
basin were higher than previously thought (McEwan et al. 2001). Today, ADE soils are
mined and sold as potting soil in Brazilian cities, selected by farmers for their
agricultural properties. To ‘‘reverse engineer’’ such soils would build a direct link
between archaeological interpretation and contemporary agricultural alternatives.
Faunal and skeletal studies
Faunal analysis provides a crucial body of data for historical ecology. Recent efforts
have included the documentation of fully domesticated species (Miller and Burger
1995) and species that were part of domesticated landscape (Stahl 2005a). Faunal
analysis yields evidence of indicator species (and suites of them) that accompany
human domestication of the environment (Stahl 2000, 2003, 2005b). Particularly in
the lowlands, methods in faunal analysis are advancing, with the appreciation that
water screening and filtration are needed to recover fragmentary remains of fish,
amphibians, and small mammals (Stahl 1996).
Finally, a landscape perspective has been used in bioarchaeology to study
population movements from isotopic analysis of human hair (White et al. 2009). In
this case, isotope analysis provides an independent source of data on the question of
migration of individuals to Pacatnamu (Fig. 2), a pilgrimage site, or perhaps a
political or administrative center on the Pacific Coast. When these methods are
applied critically, with careful analysis of the connection between isotope ratios and
how diet is connected to cuisine, they combine with archaeological studies to
facilitate a much more detailed and nuanced view of plant and animal consumers.
Paleobotany
East of the Andes, the palynological record suggests a long and complex interaction
between human societies and vegetation, including the use of palm forests (Iriarte
2006b). Vegetation histories provide evidence for the biogeography of forests and
savannas at large and small scales but little consensus regarding parameters of human
modification. Slash-and-burn techniques depend on fire but also on metal tools, which
in South America postdate contact with Europeans (Denevan 1998; Métraux 1959).
Slash-and-burn agriculture is neither an evolutionary holdover from the Stone Age
(Holmberg 1950), nor a regression resulting from colonial contact, but a conscious
choice that often has political motivations (Rival 2002; Scott 2009; Stearman 1987b).
Fire was an important tool for pre-Columbian South Americans, but its role in
landscape management is not well studied or agreed on (Pyne 1997, 2001).
Interpretation of the Amazonian environment also turns on the question of how
many tree species and how much of the forest was planted, tended, and manipulated
by indigenous Amazonians. Balée’s earliest estimate of 12 % of the basin covers an
area larger than France and Great Britain combined, but even half that figure
represents 840,000 km2 (Balée 1989). Framing tropical forests as gardens or
artifacts belies the notion that Amazonians moved through the forest with very little
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impact on their environment. Peach palm (Bactris gasipaes) domestication is a clear
example of why tropical forests must be analyzed as artifacts, much as an earlier
generation of archaeologists considered maize cobs as artifacts (Clement 1999a, b).
The expansion of pine forests (favored by fire) into the southern Brazilian highlands
(Fig. 5) provided pine nuts, a significant and reliable resource, to the economies that
underwrote complex societies beginning in the third millennium BC (Iriarte and
Behling 2007). Erickson and Balée (2006) combine archaeological and ethnobotanical research at a small scale to demonstrate that pre-Columbian mound-builders
constructed landscapes by both building earthworks and planting and tending the
forests growing on them. In short, if tropical forests symbolize pristine or untouched
nature, this interpretation cannot withstand these studies. That tropical forest grows
on pre-Columbian earthworks is a powerful statement about the hybrid of nature and
culture in the Amazon, with global implications.
Plant domestication
The use of palynological and micro- and macrobotanical techniques to model plant
domestication has grown. Scholars have defined hearths of domestication for a wide
variety of plants, as well as the associated social and cultural changes. This line of
Fig. 5 Area map with locations mentioned in the text in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil
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Fig. 6 Area map with locations mentioned in the text in Colombia and Venezuela
argument draws on systems models, such as coevolution (Rindos 1984), to explain
the role of maize in the development of agriculture and agricultural societies across
the Americas. For South Americanists, maize has proved as controversial as for
Mesoamericanists. Its development has been proposed as a watershed in the
development of agriculture and sociocultural organization (Roosevelt 1980; Staller
et al. 2006).
At issue has been the reinterpretation of data from lowland Ecuador. Staller and
Thompson (2002) argue that maize appeared more recently in the Ecuadorian
Formative, tied to ritual activity rather than subsistence. Pearsall and her colleagues
counter with data from Real Alto (Fig. 2) to defend the antiquity of maize in
Ecuador, as well as its importance as a food source (Duncan et al 2009; Pearsall
2002; Pearsall et al. 2004; Pearsall and Piperno 1990; Piperno and Dillehay 2008;
Zarrillo et al. 2008). Deboer and Raymond (2006) compiled an ethnological survey
of the cultivation of maize by nomadic groups and found that maize is the last plant
abandoned before trekking and the first cultivated after choosing sedentism. Rather
than a determinant or marker of comprehensive changes in population or social
organization, maize is one of a large repertoire of plants used to create a variety of
cuisines in different environments.
Deboer and Raymond reinterpret plant domestication, breaking the links binding
the constellation of ceramics, sedentism, agriculture, and population. In northwestern South America, for example, fiber-tempered pottery is associated with the
earliest sedentary communities, but no link between fiber-tempered pottery and
sedentism exists at San Jacinto on the northwest coast of Colombia (Fig. 6)
(Oyuela-Caycedo and Bonzani 2005). Fiber-tempered pottery is connected to the
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serving of foods at a communal scale, however. If foods served in fiber-tempered
pots were part of a formal or ritual setting, even at this early date (5,200-6,000 BP),
then the connection between economy and ritual is basic. This ties landscape
archaeology to both the interpretation of ceramic assemblages and public
architecture and the recent emphasis on feasting as an explanatory process in the
development of political and social organization (Bray 2003; Duncan et al. 2009;
Iriarte et al. 2008; Klokler 2008; Swenson 2006).
As part of a pan-American debate over alternative paths to the domestication of
maize, DeBoer (2003) notes that our models of plant domestication are preoccupied
with famine and population pressure, whereas: ‘‘…emphasizing the appeal of sweet
and fermentable stalks injects desirous human agents into the account, a palliative
for the stern ‘food crises’ and ‘population pressures’ that haunt our angst-driven
prehistories. How charming it would be to have a snack-and-party crowd, hassled by
only an occasional aggrandizer or two, at the base of the Neolithic!’’ DeBoer lays
bare the links between modern assumptions and interpretations of even the remote
past. Consideration of domestication within specific landscapes makes these
assumptions clearer.
Palynological studies now incorporate more trained specialists, comparative
collections, and reference materials, particularly for the lowlands (Colinvaux et al.
1999). Techniques permit the analysis of starch grains recovered from both
archaeological soils and residues scraped from lithics and ceramics (Chandler-Ezell
et al. 2006; Pearsall et al. 2007; Piperno and Dillehay 2008). In addition to
providing information on plants otherwise difficult to document (such as manioc
and other root crops), these breakthroughs provide direct evidence of preColumbian cuisines.
Starch grains can be used to identify plant remains to genus (and in some cases to
species level) and also to define suites of utilized plants directly from the remains
preserved on ceramics and other food-processing tools. A recent study from
preceramic coastal Peru (Chillon Valley, Fig. 2) analyzes squash and gourd
containers (Duncan et al. 2009). Interpreting these data in relationship to landscape
means that paleoenvironmental reconstruction can be linked to histories of
agriculture and cuisine. The consideration of food and landscape together in a
‘‘provisioning spreadsheet’’ (Terrell et al. 2003) model is a continuation of
ecological understanding of humans and other species in systemic relationships.
Starch grains taken from teeth in the Ñanchoc Valley provide direct evidence for
‘‘predomestication cultivation’’ by about 6,600 BC (Piperno and Dillehay 2008).
Even at this early date, these ways of life are linked to modification of the
landscape.
Landscape domestication: Toward built environment
Landscape archaeologists contribute to debates about the origins of agriculture by
redefining domestication, pulling research away from attributes of individual plants
or animals to how landscape morphology reflects human manipulation. Spatial
analysis of vegetation, movement of animals, and the manipulation of fire, soil, and
water to create and control patterns leads to the consideration of the domestication
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of the landscape rather than just the plants and animals found in it. Denevan’s
(2001) review of the geography of plant domestication in South America
demonstrates that artificial selection of plants and the investment of labor in the
landscape must be considered together rather than as a two-step process (see also
Steward 1930). The transition to agriculture in the New World, and in South
America in particular, is now understood as having several loci of domestication for
a variety of important plants: grasses, tubers, fruits, trees, and industrial plants
(Piperno and Pearsall 1998). It now appears that domestication took place about as
early in the New World as in the Old World (Denham et al. 2007; Pearsall 2009).
That many domesticates originated east of the Andes forces reconsideration of
contact and movement of people and crop plants across the continent, perhaps more
than 14,000 years ago. The earliest documented inhabitants of South America at
Monte Verde (Fig. 5) used a variety of plants and animals, which reinforces both the
dating of that site and its interpretation as an economy distinct from that of North
American Clovis peoples (Dillehay 1989). Identification of nine seaweed species, as
well as terrestrial plants from different microenvironments, confirms that the
inhabitants of Monte Verde had a sophisticated understanding of the properties and
value of many plants and ecological niches (Dillehay et al. 2008).
The record of plant and animal domestication continues to be extended back in
time, and it is being profitably reconsidered in relation to geographic factors as the
‘‘domestication of the landscape’’—a perspective that sprouted decades ago (Sauer
1952). Using a spatial perspective, ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological studies of
hunter-gatherers and part-time farmers allow this process to be documented in detail
(Politis 1996, 2007; Stearman 1987b). Human communities domesticate the
landscape by changing the geographic distribution of plants and animals, not only
by planting or taming them but also by controlling fire and water to make them more
easily available in specific locations. Groves of peach palms, stands of chocolate
trees, and abandoned fields that attract prey animals all result from human intention
(Clement et al. 2009). When and where landscape domestication takes place, the
spatial pattern and natural history of plants and animals are heavily modified, even
when genotype and morphology do not change measurably.
Landscape archaeologists understand the environment as a dynamic relationship
between human communities, plants, animals, soils, climate, and topography.
Although this idea has long been considered, recent studies illustrate that as the
category of ‘‘environment’’ is analyzed, rather than taken as a constant or even as an
independent variable, then the connection between pre-Columbian South Americans
and contemporary South America becomes much clearer. Habitats throughout the
continent were shaped through interaction with long histories of human occupation.
Landscape as built or marked environment
When an Andean farmer irrigates a raised field but keeps her huaca in view, or an
Amazonian trader paddles downriver past the ‘‘village of the birds,’’ the landscape
manifests a relationship between individual and group. Built environment studies
draw landscape archaeology into a deep collaborative relationship with cultural
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anthropology (Basso 1996). The Huarochirı́ manuscript, a colonial testimony on
Andean religion, is suffused with examples of shared religious meaning that reside
in specific landscape features (Salomon and Urioste 1991). Connections also have
been found in the lowlands between trees that are ancestors or records of historical
events, and people who invest and recall those meanings (Rival 1993, 2006, 2007;
Rival and McKey 2008). Paleobotanical records of Amazonian forests, at large and
small scales, describe a history of plant communities through time. If, as asserted by
historical ecologists, pre-Columbian peoples significantly modified Amazonian
forests (Balée 1989), and specific groves, forest islands, or patterns also can be
associated with particular uses, then maps of botanical data can be overlaid on maps
of modern toponyms and ethnobotanical terms to connect built environments to
history and myth.
Built environments also are analyzed as investments of labor. Interpretations
range widely from the remains of state-driven political economies to analyses of
animal domestication. If landscapes are investments of labor and meaning, then
roads, agricultural fields, and isolated finds are central rather than negatively defined
off-site features. ‘‘Built environment’’ emphasizes the relationship between what
societies construct and how those constructions affect societies. The term is often
applied to how architecture crystallizes daily practice: ‘‘we shape our buildings, and
afterwards our buildings shape us’’ (from a speech by Churchill in 1943; Lawrence
and Low 1990; Rapoport 1990). Agricultural infrastructure is well known and long
studied in the Andes, which take their name from pre-Columbian terraces or
andenes. The built-environment perspective revitalized debates about social and
political organization, and the connection between political centralization and
intensive agriculture. Built environment also has been useful in the analysis of
features seemingly unrelated to production, like the Nazca lines. A powerful
connection to ethnography lies in descriptions of how South Americans inscribe
meaning in less obviously constructed features of the landscape: paths, trails,
mountain peaks, and trees.
This ‘‘marked environment’’ reflects a smaller investment of labor but no less an
investment of meaning. Rock art, trails, and paths all mark the environment; even in
the absence of physical markers, mapped landscapes of movement are repositories
of history, moral teachings, and political power (Snead et al. 2009).
Altiplano
In the 1980s, several archaeologists and anthropologists documented the scale of the
built environment in the Altiplano, concluding that raised fields covered approximately 1,200 km2 on the margins of Lake Titicaca (Bandy 2006; Erickson 2000a;
Kolata 1996). Agreement on the importance of this phenomenon gave way to
disagreements about societies that built and maintained this infrastructure. Analysis
of the Lake Titicaca Basin became an argument between top-down and bottom-up
organization of raised field agriculture, although this conversation may be
completing its course. Erickson’s bottom-up interpretation is rooted in a long-term
ethnographic and archaeological project in Huatta, Peru (Fig. 3), on the northern
end of the lake, highlighting the organizational ability and local knowledge of small
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groups of Altiplano farmers (Erickson 2006). That raised field landscapes were
within the ability of local communities to construct is now a consensus position.
Erickson sees the rise of the Tiwanaku political and economic organization as a
shorter-lived phenomenon built on top of a long-lasting foundation of intensive
farming and interlocking uses of the landscape by small communities. He argues
that the agricultural landscapes in the Titicaca Basin are fully as monumental as any
temple or pyramid. In Erickson’s interpretation, Titicaca farmers invested labor to
construct landscapes and institutions that helped them cope with both wet and dry
years. Raised fields are found in lake margin wetlands, and as the water rose and fell
and some fields were flooded or were left too dry to farm, other areas became
workable (Orlove et al. 2002).
From the top down, Kolata and Janusek make their primary task to interpret the
effect of the Tiwanaku state on the surrounding countryside (Janusek 2004; Kolata
1982, 1986; Kolata et al. 2000). Raised fields are associated with a period of
intensification chronologically linked to monumental construction and urbanism at
Tiwanaku and the development of the state. In this interpretation, based on a large
program of survey and excavation along the southern (Bolivian) end of the lake, the
Tiwanaku state created landscapes of widespread raised-field agriculture to support
its political power. When environmental conditions changed, making raised fields
unproductive, this led rapidly to the decline and fall of the state. Environmental
reconstructions based on the Quelccaya glacier (Fig. 3) are interpreted to indicate
the parameters of successful raised-field agriculture (Kolata and Ortloff 1996).
Changes in annual precipitation around AD 1000 made raised-field agriculture
untenable, undercutting the economic foundations of Tiwanaku. From this top-down
approach, analysis of the relationship between climatic changes and the built
environment is the key to understanding the collapse of the state.
Despite occasionally heated rhetoric, the two perspectives share common ground
regarding the size and scale of the modification of the lakeshore, as well as the
productivity of raised-field agriculture. Both agree that communities did not require
the direction of the state to build and farm raised fields. The dialogue reflects different
goals and a different understanding of the relationship between humans and the
environment. In the bottom-up view, the built environment is a product of local
knowledge of plants, animals, climate, and social arrangements, accumulating over
centuries. In the top-down view, it is a product of large-scale state organization that
directs modifications of the environment for the benefit of a set of translocal political
and economic institutions. The question is not whether the state is required to explain
the presence of raised-field agriculture but whether the state did in fact direct the
construction of raised fields. Reconstructing the history of political economy in the
Titicaca Basin does not preclude other avenues of investigation within this landscape.
Bandy (2006) has filled in much of the regional map of settlement pattern around
Lake Titicaca. He argues that the productivity of raised fields, based on preliminary
data, has been overstated. The impact of nematodes—soil parasites particularly
harmful to potatoes—is a significant corrective factor. Raised fields were
remarkable not for high yields but for how they allowed agricultural intensification
(such as that directed by the state) to coexist with non-raised-field subsistence
agriculture. Reaffirming Boserup’s analysis of agricultural change, he argues that
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raised fields are important, not because they allow farmers to escape Boserupian
choices between labor and land (Stone and Downum 1999), but because they
lengthen the growing season, which allowed the Tiwanaku state to finance its
activities without disrupting local production. Bandy argues that the modern failures
of raised-field reconstructions in the 1980s and 1990s reflect the limits of preColumbian systems. These failures are well documented (Swartley 2002), but the
political, social, and economic contexts of the late 20th century differ sufficiently
from the first millennium that this conclusion must be provisional. For example,
nematodes were a significant potato pest, but they may have been managed by
intentional flooding. More long-term experimental and agronomic research is
needed along with of analysis of sociopolitical organization. Agricultural choices by
individuals and groups always include political and cultural dimensions; they are
never straightforward calculations (Scott 2009).
Beyond the Andes
Raised fields are found throughout the continent in dense concentrations in the Sinú
Valley in Colombia, the coastal plains of the Guyanas, and the Llanos de Mojos in
Bolivia (see Denevan 2001). Although none have seen the same kinds of
interpretive discussions as in the Altiplano, these all have been better documented
in recent years. The Mojos landscapes, which were first documented in the 1960s,
are spread over an area much larger than the Titicaca Basin (Fig. 3), approximately
the same size as the Yucatán Peninsula or Syria. At least six distinct kinds of preColumbian agricultural landscapes (including raised fields and other earthworks)
make up this area (Walker 2008b). Mixed savanna and forest vegetation makes
these fields more difficult to record with satellite images and aerial photographs. In
several cases, raised fields and ring ditches have been found under ‘‘primary
growth’’ forest, suggesting that they may be even more widespread. Fields date to at
least 1 AD, and research has yet to focus on the origins of raised-field agriculture.
Along the Iruyañez River in north-central Mojos, raised fields are associated with
two settlements that date between the 5th-6th century AD and the 13th-15th century
(Fig. 3) (Walker 2004). Supporting a population roughly 100 times that of today,
these farmers probably abandoned their fields following the demographic disasters
associated with European contact, as well as the spread of metal tools.
East of the Mamoré River is a series of ring ditches, long causeways, and zigzag
causeways that define the Baures Hydraulic Complex, another distinctive landscape
(Fig. 3) (Erickson 2000b). Harnessing the cycle of inundation and drought, these
causeways may have created a set of artificial fisheries, as well as facilitated
communication and transport across the savanna. Ring ditches are widespread
throughout the large forested islands of the area (Erickson 2010; Prümers et al.
2006). The Arawak-speaking Baure are associated with this part of Mojos in
ethnohistorical sources. The construction of a fishery covering 525 km2 is
significant, not only for its scale but as an entirely different form of economic
intensification not directly related to cultivation of plants.
An area of closely packed fields, punctuated by causeways and mounds,
represents another distinct landscape type on the Apere River in central Mojos.
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Causeways were used there not to impound water but to limit and define areas in the
transitional zones between higher river levees and lower backslopes (Erickson and
Walker 2009). These earthworks are distinct in form and complexity from those in
other areas (Walker 2011). The same theoretical questions can be raised about the
relationship between society, agriculture, intensification, and landscape in Mojos as
the Altiplano, but in a different context. Relationships between farmers in the
highlands and lowlands, as well as between these distinct landscapes, are glaring
and understudied questions.
Associations between raised fields and Arawak-speaking groups have drawn
comment from two different perspectives (Hill and Santos-Granero 2002; see also
Denevan 1966; Lathrap 1970). Heckenberger sees earthworks as a signature of
Arawak-speaking peoples who migrated along the main channels of the Amazon
(Heckenberger 2002, 2005). Raised fields and associated earthworks represent a
transformational historical event that took place throughout lowland South America,
connecting Arawak ethnic identity with a constellation of political authority, large
villages, and an ideology combining ideas of power and the body. In the second
perspective, Arawak ethnicity is more flexible and associated with earthworks as
part of a continental system of trade and interaction (Hornborg 2005). In this view,
Arawak is more of a lingua franca, making possible interaction between people
speaking a variety of languages. Political and economic histories of lowland
societies will have to be investigated in much more detail and then compared with
and related to developments in neighboring areas, such as the Southern Cone and
the Andes.
Raised fields in other regions are increasingly well documented. In the Guayas
Basin, Ecuador (Fig. 2) (Delgado 2002), San Jorge, Colombia, and Venezuela
(Fig. 6) (Redmond and Spencer 2007; Rostain 2008, 2010), research continues in
areas where raised fields were documented in the 1960s. In the Guyanas, the lifetime
of work by Williams (1997, 2003) has been published posthumously. Raised fields,
associated with Arawak speakers, are found in the wetlands on the backslopes of
coastal dunes. Earthworks are found in French Guiana, associated there with
Barrancoid and Arauquinoid peoples (Rostain 2008).
Raised fields have recently been mapped in an entirely new area on the Bı́o-Bı́o
River in central Chile (Fig. 5) (Dillehay 2007; Dillehay et al. 2007). This region is
well known for the determined and effective resistance of Araucanian peoples to
Inca, Spanish, and Chilean rule, lasting into the 1890s. The presence of agricultural
infrastructure adds another layer of complexity to how nearby Araucanians
(including the Mapuche) related to earthworks as social beings. It also suggests a
relationship between systems of agricultural intensification and the ability of
communities to resist incorporation into the state. Raised fields are likely to go
unnoticed unless they are actively sought out. Particularly under thick vegetation,
earthworks are very difficult to recognize. Modification of the environment, in the
form of irrigation canals, predates the establishment of domesticated plants as
important food sources in the Zaña Valley in Peru (Fig. 2) (Dillehay et al. 2005).
Isolated examples of earthworks and entire built environments likely remain to be
documented in both the highlands and the lowlands. The long and rich history of
studying terraced agriculture in the Andes is highlighted below.
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Marked environments
Agricultural landscapes occupy South American archaeologists, but the Nazca lines
may resonate more strongly with a wider audience (Fig. 2) (Curry 2009). Of a range
of interpretations, the Nazca lines have been seen as markers of celestial alignments,
although Aveni (1990, 2000, 2003) has shown that astronomical explanations may
be overdrawn. In a parallel to Erickson’s raised-field construction experiments,
Aveni shows that the lines can be constructed by a small number of people and that
an essentially infinite number of alignments are possible. Function is more tightly
connected to the junctions that spatially organize many of the straight lines (as
opposed to zoomorphic forms and trapezoidal shapes). Johnson proposes a
provocative link between the end points of many lines and underground water
sources (Johnson et al. 2002), indicating that the Nazca marked important terrestrial
locations. Silverman’s (1993) research at Cahuachi links the Nazca lines to the
nearby pyramids and settlement (Fig. 2). She argues that Cahuachi was a sacred
location and the settlement was built by the annual pilgrimages of many different
groups of people. The stronger interpretation of the lines is as pathways for
movements of people.
A powerful approach to comparing these viewpoints is the comprehensive mapping
of the lines by a multidisciplinary, international project (Lambers 2004). This project
combines the careful mapping of all the geoglyphs in painstaking detail through aerial
photogrammetry at a level of precision impossible in a ground survey, except at a very
high cost. All geoglyphs will be mapped such that comprehensive statements about
their characteristics can be made: orientation, connections to water features, and
connections to archaeologically known and dated settlement.
The line builders were investing less labor per unit area in the landscape than
terrace builders or raised-field builders, but they certainly invested as much meaning
in the landscape. Similar geoglyphs are well known from different parts of the coast
and the highlands. Briones (2006) has mapped geoglyphs in northern Chile at Azapa
(Fig. 3), and it seems likely that more examples will be forthcoming as these
features enter the consciousness of more fieldworkers.
Rock art
The study of rock art has a long tenure in South American archaeology. Recent
studies locate representations of animals not only within the landscape, as marked
points, but as indicators of the process of domestication among pastoral peoples.
The presentation of camelids in rock art shows a significant difference between
shorter- and longer-legged representations, which may map onto domesticated and
wild forms (Gallardo and Yacobaccio 2005). Although rock art is best documented
in northwestern Argentina and the southern periphery of the Andean world, it has
been studied elsewhere in South America as well (Carden 2007; Clarkson 1999;
Hernández Llosas 2006; Nieves 2007; Roosevelt 1999; Troncoso Meléndez 2004).
Roosevelt’s study connects rock art to early evidence of occupation in the Amazon
Basin (Fig. 4), and a recent study has connected rock art at Monte Alegre to specific
celestial events (Davis 2009).
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Although it is difficult to date, rock art links human activity clearly to a particular
location—a strong link in space. Toponyms are not as precisely linked, but
toponymy also holds great promise for landscape archaeologists. A fruitful alliance
with linguistic anthropology and the revival of historical linguistics also could be
founded on the study of toponyms (Epps 2009; Heggarty and Beresford-Jones
2010). This gives field archaeologists and local stakeholders common ground as
they negotiate the everyday concerns of archaeological practice. Linguistic terms
for trees are another avenue by which landscape and language can be linked (Balée
and Badie 2009).
Classifying different kinds of built environments, from dense raised-field
landscapes, to bundles of lines crossing the landscapes, to patterns of isolated
pieces of rock art (analogous to areas, lines, and points [see Patterson 2008]), does
not demonstrate a connection between the intensity of landscape construction and
the amount of meaning invested in living in that same landscape, or the position of a
society on an evolutionary scale. By the 1930s, Steward had already pointed out that
communities with gathering and hunting economies were modifying and maintaining aspects of their environment (Clemmer 2009; Steward 1930). The example of
Paiute people irrigating plants in the absence of domesticated plants (perhaps
paralleled by the Ñanchoc example) is an object lesson that manipulation of the
environment is not the exclusive province of modern industrial societies or of
premodern, agricultural societies.
Landscape archaeology has made great strides in documenting built environments across South America. These demonstrations of the effects of human activity
on environments usually considered ‘‘natural’’ are achievements that open a new
field of inquiry. The next step (which many archaeologists are already taking) is to
understand how the built environment conditioned culture or behavior. As with
buildings, so with the environment: pre-Columbian communities built their
landscapes and their landscapes built them.
Landscape as cosmos and stage
In the institutions where archaeologists work, a gulf has been fixed between the
study of the physical world and the supernatural. Cartesian divisions between mind
and body, form and substance, and nature and culture both support and are
supported by this division of labor. Because cosmology seems to be attached to
specific places, in indigenous South America this gulf is not so wide. For example,
the newly translated ethnoarchaeology of the Nukak (Politis 2007) contains an
anecdote in which digging a hole runs the risk of breaking through into the
underworld, located only a meter or two below the surface. If South Americans
move (and perhaps moved) between different worlds so easily during everyday life,
then landscape archaeologists should discuss and analyze the link between the
terrestrial world on which people walk and the celestial world that turns overhead,
and how people move in and between those worlds.
Since the mid-20th century, Zuidema (1985, 1990) has interpreted Inca
calendrics as a link between kinship, politics, and spatial organization. The Inca
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state used ceque lines in the 15th century AD to connect and organize huacas near
Cuzco, places invested with centuries of meaning (Fig. 2). These ideas are reflected
in the way Spanish-speaking chroniclers described indigenous places, people, and
history. Huacas can be impressive buildings but also mountain peaks, large rocks, or
springs. Their meanings can be shared across wide areas, but they always have
important local meanings as well. Zuidema’s structuralist model is rooted in the
interpretation of ethnohistoric materials, documenting how Inca religion pulled
meaning from mountain peaks and the sky overhead. This model is a top-down
understanding of Inca spatial organization, in that Inca principles redefined holy
places across much of the Andes. Independently, Aveni (1990, 2003) relates ‘‘naked
eye’’ astronomy with cultural context and demystifies archaeoastronomy, confirming that the Inca were accomplished observers of the night sky. Sherbondy (1993,
1996) takes Zuidema’s model to interpret spatial patterns of agricultural land.
Archaeological survey complements ethnohistoric analysis, and in the 1990s, Bauer
and Dearborn surveyed the Cuzco Valley to find evidence for the huacas associated
with the ceque system, through pedestrian survey and test excavation (Bauer 1990,
1992, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2004, 2007; Bauer and Dearborn 1995). The places that can
be surveyed and identified with particular huacas are not located along the straight
lines identified by the ethnohistoric sources. The two sources of information can be
used together (Aveni 2003), and although this question remains open, what written
sources refer to as ceque lines connected huacas with points on the horizon, even
when the places do not lie in a straight line. Practices of dwelling in the landscape
need not conflict with ideals of how the landscape was organized, and the ideal does
not determine the layout of huacas according to astronomical sight lines.
A related study was set on the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, strongly linked
to Inca imperial ideology (Fig. 3). Its location outside the sacred valley and the
center of the empire links Inca origins to the lake and to the Altiplano to the south.
The island’s settlement history predates Inca occupation and reinterpretation
(Stanish and Bauer 2004). The island also is covered with terraces, an almost
complete translation of the island from a ‘‘natural’’ to ‘‘cultural’’ place, through the
ascription and investment of meaning and the investment of labor in durable
agricultural infrastructure. As previously mentioned, Erickson illustrates the
difference between a site-based and a landscape-based methodology with this
example (Erickson 2006).
The much earlier center of Chankillo (4th century BC) on the coast has been
interpreted in part as a celestial observatory (Fig. 2) because of sight lines to the 13
towers east of the fortress (Ghezzi 2006; Ghezzi and Ruggles 2006, 2007). These
towers, the fortress, and a building located between them form a calendrical device,
a connection to the celestial world. This building may have been where participants
walked from a visually restricted enclosure to suddenly witness the sunrise over one
of the towers. This interpretation links colonial and ethnohistoric evidence of nakedeye astronomy to pre-Columbian architecture and site plans. Chankillo also is a
central piece of evidence in the interpretation of early warfare. If the fortress
overlooked this celestial observatory, then one of its functions may have been to
defend it, whatever the nature of Andean warfare at that time.
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In the sierra, Williams and Nash (2006) interpret the summit of Cerro Baúl
(Fig. 3) as an apu, or mountain spirit within a community of sacred mountain peaks;
they link it to surrounding apus and the faraway communities that also can see them.
Cerro Baúl is thereby linked to locations that symbolized ethnic identity. Through
sight lines (analyzed through GIS analysis combined with field observation), the
high ground that the Wari occupied connected the Moquegua Valley to a largerscale system and to a longer history. The areas from which these peaks can be
viewed (their ‘‘viewsheds’’) provide an avenue for understanding the spatial
dimensions of local and regional religious practice.
East and west of the Andes, other landscapes have been interpreted as
expressions of celestial knowledge. Geoglyphs on the Pampa Colorado, associated
with the Nazca, have in the past been interpreted as manifestations of Nazca beliefs
connected to astronomical events (Curry 2009). Recent descriptions of the
geometrically precise ‘‘geoglyphs’’ of western Brazil raise the possibility of an
astronomical interpretation and suggest that more examples are forthcoming
(Pärsinnen et al. 2009). However, Aveni (1990) argued decisively that with a nearly
infinite number of possible correlations, the burden of proof that particular
orientations were meaningful is very high.
Links between kinship, space, and settlement also are important outside the
Andes. For example, the Isoseño Guaranı́ of southeastern Bolivia (Fig. 3) orient
themselves along a meandering, lowland river, a geographic feature not used in the
highlands (Ortiz et al. 2008). Living along the Parapetı́ River, Guaranı́ speakers
draw mythological meaning from particular locations, as well as the two sides of the
river, each of which stands for different worlds within Isoseño cosmology. These
specific consequences of the communal understanding of spatial organization for
village layout, subsistence activities, and interpretation of space in the present day
provide a rich source of analogy for archaeologists (Hill and Santos-Granero 2002).
The connection between celestial objects and events on the one hand and
terrestrial landscapes on the other seems to have been commemorated and inscribed
by a variety of communities in South America, as in other parts of the Americas.
These connections are accessible when the landscape is viewed as infused with
meaning. They can become part of living history when people enact meanings on
the landscape as actors on a stage.
When the landscape is a stage for performance, archaeologists stumble into
conversation with a broad range of disciplines, especially in the humanities: history
and ethnohistory, even semiotics, literature, and theater. The tie between
archaeology and cultural anthropology is particularly strong here. In pre-Columbian
societies, the role of public places in corporate life makes the analysis of
performance and stagecraft necessary, both indoors and outdoors. The landmark
film ‘‘In the Footsteps of Taytacha’’ demonstrates how modern peoples use not only
churches for religious rituals but glaciers, mountainsides, and trails to express and
reinforce local and translocal identities (Getzels and Gordon 1985). Landscape is a
stage when pilgrims to Qollur Riti, having come from throughout the southern
Andes, travel up the mountain and create a gigantic, whirling pattern of color and
sound, moving across a high mountain vale. Recent studies there have tremendous
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promise for reinterpreting the role of ritual in pre-Columbian South America and
across the Americas.
To see landscape as stage foregrounds indigenous ritual practice, including the
agency of nonhuman elements of the landscape. Burial mounds (or kuel) are cultural
actors, not passive settings, in recent studies in Araucania (Dillehay 2007). Dillehay
and his interlocutors interpret decades of work in Chile to create a close reading of
people using mounds and mounds using people for their own ends. Dillehay
effectively integrates cultural anthropology and archaeology. Ethnographic data,
including transcripts of ritual singing and placations of the kuel, are juxtaposed with
archaeological data, not only through analogy but through relationships between
people and specific kuel, which also are (from a separate perspective) archaeological
sites. Archaeologists enter these worlds precisely through archaeological practice.
Working in relationship with indigenous communities, petitioning the mounds for
permission, archaeologists act within rituals that relate archaeological practice to
indigenous belief.
Dillehay analyzes kuel both as independent actors and within relationships
between Araucanian communities and the Inca, colonial, and Chilean states. The
landscape was used to create and defend Araucanian identity in a particular
historical context. Indigenous peoples in Araucania resisted state incorporation from
the 14th through the 19th century, and these landscapes are related to nonstate
spaces in other contexts (see also Scott 2009).
In a separate project, Moore presents a synthetic view of Andean landscapes as
stages, building a strong link between the perception of sound and light, the logistics
of daily life and ritual, and pre-Columbian architecture (Moore 1996, 2004, 2006;
see also Conklin 1990). Including both ethnographic analogies and experimental
studies, Moore classifies private and public architecture in the sierra and on the
coast, connecting it to ritual activities that could have taken place within them.
Some ritual spaces accommodate only a handful of participants while others permit
hundreds. Moore traces three distinctive trajectories between the Andes and the
coast. Differences in ritual practice relate to how religious and political leadership
was constructed, supported, and dismantled. This method, which focuses on
quantifiable and verifiable connections between the archaeological record and
specific practices, has tremendous potential; it should certainly be applied more
widely.
Moore’s results suggest significant contrasts between coastal and highland
religious traditions in the Andes, including the earliest examples of public
architecture: U-shaped temples on the North coast of Peru. Moore applies proxemics
to study how vision and hearing work at different spatial scales. This refines the
analysis of regional traditions that can be seen in public architecture and accesses
religious practice by ‘‘reading’’ the landscape. In a similar vein, Dillehay connects
individual households with segmented ritual spaces to understand changes during
the Late Intermediate period in the Zaña Valley in coastal Peru (Dillehay 2004).
Andean archaeologists have long thought of individual sites, temples, and
pyramids as stages for ritual performances. Architectural details such as the tunnels
at Chavı́n, archaeological evidence of pilgrimage from across the Andes at
Pachacamac, and the relationship between the sacred valley and Cuzco suggested a
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necessary relationship between public architecture and public ritual. Similarly, in
the Amazonian lowlands the center of the village is swept clean, maintained as a
symbolically charged location for many rituals (Heckenberger 2005). Linear
features such as roads, ceque lines, and geoglyphs also have been interpreted as the
settings for processions and ritual movement, both in the highlands and the
lowlands.
Archaeologists have studied stagecraft at several sites and in the context of
several theoretical issues in recent years. The site center at Tiwanaku has been
reinterpreted according to at least two perspectives (Isbell and Vranich 2004;
Yaeger and Bejarano 2004). The symbolic power of the Akapana pyramid and
nearby sunken court was adopted and changed by the Inca, who recognized the
power of this place. Vranich (2006) highlights the mechanisms by which these
buildings channeled the movements of pilgrims to the site and channeled the
thoughts of those pilgrims moving through the architecture, experiencing different
vistas and perhaps different soundscapes as well.
In addition to more conventional excavation techniques, Vranich and colleagues
painstakingly reconstructed architecture to better understand how ritual took place.
The Pumapunku and the Akapana are parts of a complicated whole, designed to
produce a series of effects in the minds of religious pilgrims, guiding them through a
series of places, views, and experiences. As with the Inca and Chankillo examples,
the method employed was to control the ‘‘viewshed’’ of the participants as they
moved, culminating in moments when the vista changed dramatically. At Tiwanaku,
the visibility of mountain peaks (and carved stone monuments like the Bennett and
Ponce monoliths) was controlled to link Tiwanaku the place to such powerful
entities. Recent disputes show that this question is still important today, with
different stakeholders and groups contesting claims about monoliths and patrimony
(Scarborough 2008, pp. 1089–1101).
Chavı́n de Huántar has long been framed as a religious theater, with elements of
architecture and stone monuments illustrating the importance of hallucinogenic
drugs. Chavı́n as an art style or ‘‘horizon’’ is significant because the art style is
visible both on the coast and in the highlands. At Chavı́n, Rick (2004) and
colleagues mapped the interior of the Old Temple, showing how tunnels, carved
stone monuments, and conduits for water and light created an intense ‘‘multimedia’’
experience. Contreras (2009) used GIS to relate the site to the complex topography
and ecology of the surrounding mountains. The temple derived its symbolic power
from the production of individual experiences through group ritual combined with
the controlled use of potent hallucinogens. The galleries generated a religious
experience through sound, confinement, and sudden confrontation with the divine,
as represented by the Lanzón at the center of the Old Temple. Whatever the specific
messages, they were powerfully recalled by the use of ceramics or textiles that
graphically referenced ritual experiences. Understanding how the tunnels were built
and maintained reveals that the construction and use of elaborate ritual places by
South Americans dates back at least 1,800 years. Chavı́n clearly exemplifies a
tradition in which a limited number of people participate in ritual at any one
moment.
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Through analysis of architecture and public ritual at Chiripa (Fig. 3), Hastorf
(2003) also draws on Moore’s perspective to reinterpret Titicaca Basin archaeology.
As architectural forms took on the form of a subterranean court, rituals and
attendant institutions took on the form that would support later Middle Horizon
civilization. This analysis interprets the uses to which architecture can be put and
the experience of individuals relating those rituals and experiences to the spread of
ideas around Lake Titicaca. Chiripa was a historical pivot, as Andean peoples tried
out new ways to make a living, organize community life, and share religious and
cosmological ideas.
Recovery and analysis of remains of large-scale production and use of chicha (or
corn beer) at the mountaintop of Cerro Baúl confirm that this place was
commemorated and used for several interlocking purposes (Moseley et al. 2005;
Williams and Nash 2004). Evidence takes the form of massive jars for fermentation
as well as a suite of vessel forms associated with serving and consumption. The
brewery was ritually terminated around AD 800, when the vessels were smashed
and the building destroyed by fire. The architectural complex is associated with an
institution of ‘‘chosen women’’ who were taken from their kin-based societies of
origin and claimed by the Wari for this purpose.
Several centuries later, throughout the Andes, the Inca connected a network of
places, using a system of roads but also architectural canons, including ushnus (or
platforms), kallankas (or feasting halls), and public spaces where state power was
expressed and reinforced (Staller 2008). Coben shows that the duplication of
architectural canons across the empire was a conscious imperial strategy that
allowed the same set of state rituals to take place across the empire (Inomata and
Coben 2006). Coben and Inomata examine buildings as stages for performance in
cross-cultural perspective, and Coben takes Inca architecture at Incallacta as his
focus (Fig. 3). Inca buildings and monuments, and combinations of them, have
many features in common, even when they are not exact copies of central places at
Cuzco. Coben suggests that these locations had in common the ability of the
architecture to condition and shape the rituals that took place there. Although the
entire set of architectural features was not always present, Inca buildings share the
ability to support officials of the Inca state as they both received and dispensed
tribute. State power was created and maintained through economic redistribution
and political power, but also through carefully managed ritual.
Inca buildings follow a set of patterns that replicate a space tailored to the ritual
practices used to create and project state power across the continent. The Inca state
organized the construction of buildings and other infrastructure to demonstrate
power: for example, the movement of 700-kg basalt blocks over 1,600 km of
mountainous terrain between Cuzco and Saraguro (Fig. 2) (Ogburn 2004). The
creation of Inca ‘‘theaters’’ throughout the empire (and especially in the south and
southeastern parts of the empire) meant that long after their construction,
expressions of state power could be accompanied by the proper retelling of Inca
narratives. The ability of the Inca to control groups of people, each with their own
narratives describing proper relations with the surrounding places, depended to a
large extent on their ability to translate political and economic power into the
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symbolic realm. These systematically replicated architectural complexes both
created and were reinforced by this process.
Archaeologists who define landscape as a stage have traveled far from the notion
that the landscape is a constant, limiting factor in cultural evolution. The two views
are not completely incompatible, however. In both, culture is opposed to nature,
even if understandings of those factors are diametrically opposed.
Landscape as pattern
Nowhere is the concept of archaeological settlement patterns older than in South
America. Willey’s (1953) Virú Valley study pushed archaeology toward a larger
scale. The approach quickly became influential for comparing regions via spatial
patterns of archaeological sites (MacNeish et al. 1975). In the 1960s and 1970s, the
study of settlement patterns came to define how archaeological regions were studied
and characterized across the Americas. Settlement survey in South America has
progressed more slowly because of a smaller number of research projects, but many
blank spaces on the map are being filled in.
Since 2000, settlement survey has mapped previously undocumented occupation
in every South American country, sketched new areas where archaeological
research is beginning, and changed an Andes-centered view of South American
prehistory (Stahl 2004). Extending our knowledge of settlement back in time and
across space is part of a new synthesis (Silverman and Isbell 2008). After decades in
which South America was identified closely with Andean civilization, archaeologists have built a more continental map of settlement; at the same time, new tools
for the curation, manipulation, analysis, and distribution of spatial data are being
developed. The advent of more accessible GIS software and lower-cost data makes
settlement patterns easier to place in larger geographic contexts.
Settlement archaeology and other kinds of landscape archaeology are codependent because the archaeological record of landscape is incomplete without
settlement, and settlement is related to other aspects of landscape. One way to
bring together these different views is to keep open the question of scale. Different
interpretations result from working at different spatial scales and privileging
‘‘settlement pattern’’ or ‘‘site’’ or ‘‘landscape.’’ When such terms are carefully
defined and located in space, then different interpretations can be compared.
Settlement archaeology always has incorporated scale by recognizing the differences between regions, settlements, sites, households, and activity areas, even if
emphasis has remained on regions and other large patterns. Recognition that no
single scale holds the analytical key to questions about culture or behavior provides
common ground between settlement studies and other landscape archaeologies.
The necessary complements to settlement patterns are well-defined methodologies of settlement survey. If the daily work of a survey archaeologist is to find sites,
this requires a binary interpretation of the landscape. Survey methodologies define
clear criteria to make this decision, such as numbers of artifacts (Dunnell 1992).
Siteless archaeology, the recording of archaeological information before or without
making this decision, shows how settlement patterns can coexist with other
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approaches; this approach also is represented in South America (Drennan and
Peterson 2006). Many survey projects have completed work and published results in
the past ten years; the following sections represent only the briefest tour of some of
these studies. I have selected examples that reflect a landscape perspective.
Titicaca Basin
Surveys in the Titicaca Basin have multiplied, especially on the southern, Bolivian
side of the lake. Satellite imagery, GIS, digital photography, and other technologies
overcome many logistical problems at reduced costs. Comprehensive survey of the
Katari correlates the history of Tiwanaku with this outlying valley (Janusek 2001,
2002, 2004, 2006; Janusek and Kolata 2004). In nearby Khonko Wankane, surveys
provide a comparative case for the beginnings of settlement centralization and the
concentration of political power (Stanish et al. 2005). Because Stanish and his
colleagues extended the surveyed areas of the basin around the lake to both the
north and south, they make it possible to model social process such as interpolity
competition and warfare across the entire basin (Stanish 1994, 2002; Stanish et al.
2002, see also Burger et al. 2000). Plourde and Stanish (2006) base their
evolutionary model of complex society and social, political, religious, and economic
relationships on 3,000 years of settlement history. One reflection of this is the shift
in terminology from horizons and intermediate periods to the definition of the
Andean Formative, although this is by no means universal.
Working in the sharply defined environment of the Island of the Sun within Lake
Titicaca, Stanish and Bauer (2004) focused on a landscape invested with meaning
by local inhabitants and by Andean peoples more generally. The Island of the Sun
was thought of as the mythological origin of the Inca, although the state was
centered on Cuzco to the north. A very dense pattern of sites covers the island, and
the settlement survey documents a long-term occupation that predates the Inca.
In his survey and excavation of Formative sites on Lake Titicaca, Bandy (2004,
2005, 2006) used settlement data as part of a comparative study of early villages and
a new model of the Neolithic transition around the world. He combined
comprehensive surveys over a large region with a sophisticated understanding of
the relationship between settlement and agricultural infrastructure. Taking a
comparative approach, Bandy sees Lake Titicaca as an expression of a dynamic
combination of factors that led to the rapid development of village life, the key
building block of Altiplano society.
Moquegua Valley
Combining Titicaca Basin data with surveys from the Moquegua Valley to the
southwest makes it possible to evaluate Tiwanaku as an archaeological phenomenon
in its core and on its periphery (Goldstein 2005). Goldstein’s model of migration
draws links between Andean patterns of ethnicity and population movement in
historic time and during the Middle Horizon. Drawing on contemporary Andean
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migration, Goldstein makes a nuanced argument that migration is always more than
movement from one location to another. Instead, it involves a complex set of
negotiations in several locations, including movements of people and culturally
charged objects in several directions over time. Tiwanaku as a regional phenomenon
is therefore less an imperial project and more a complex of material culture
associated with an ethnic identity, negotiated differently in different geographic
contexts. Much like modern Andean peoples, the Tiwanaku constructed identities at
different points in their lives in relationship to the places where they were born and
the places where they moved.
Settlement surveys by Williams and Nash in the Moquegua Valley around Cerro
Baúl are an admirable treatment of the relationship between Tiwanaku and Wari, the
other major phenomenon of the Middle Horizon, which they ground in a
sophisticated theoretical foundation (Williams 2001; Williams and Nash 2002).
Spatial patterns of settlement outside central Peru appear to be reflections of a
different expression of communal identity across space. Settlement patterns outside
the Wari ‘‘heartland’’ also may be related to water sources taken as religious places
(Glowacki and Malpass 2003). The example of Wari settlement on Cerro Baúl and
Tiwanaku settlement in the valley, with almost no contact between them, confounds
expectations. Cerro Baúl illustrates geographic differences between Wari and
Tiwanaku settlement; it is a compelling case study in which contemporary traditions
coexisted within the same valley.
Hayashida (2006) and colleagues combine the survey of settlements and
agricultural infrastructure on the Peruvian coast. Coastal settlements in the Pampa
de Chaparrı́ (Fig. 2) combined irrigation agriculture at a very early date with a long
tradition of exploiting maritime resources. Agricultural infrastructure was part of
local sociopolitical structures, and even when dominated by powerful rulers from
Chan Chan (Fig. 2), systems were administered locally (see Netherly 1984). The
state was still strongly associated with the development of irrigation, however. A
similar connection is drawn for the southern Moche state, where the administration
of irrigation agriculture does not appear to have been as important as other factors
(Billman 2002). Infrastructure associated with intensive agriculture does not require
state intervention to create or sustain, but building such infrastructure does attract
the interest of the state.
Even in regions as well known as the Peruvian coast, settlement survey has made
tremendous contributions near Caral (Fig. 2). Survey and reanalysis of Norte Chico
by several researchers have located many large settlements in a small area; the
dating of monumental architecture at these sites to the fourth millennium BC has
placed the development of complex society in the Andean region in the same time
frame as the oldest comparative examples from around the world (Haas and
Creamer 2006; Shady Solı́s 2006), including Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus, and
Chinese civilizations. That these examples of monumental architecture may be
associated with fishing economies continues a long debate in South American
archaeology (Moseley 1975). Even if no further ‘‘Norte Chicos’’ await our
(re)discovery, mapping and understanding of this region is fragmentary, and welldesigned settlement surveys remain indispensable.
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East of the Andes
The eastern slope cannot be downplayed or marginalized as a miscellaneous
category between the Andes to the west and the Amazon to the east (Fig. 1) (Church
1994; Church and von Hagen 2008). Although interpretations have focused on how
ideas, artifacts, animals, and plants flowed between the highlands and the lowlands,
the eastern slope was not a hybrid of cultural traits, but instead an independent locus
of cultural life and sociopolitical organization. Site surveys in the Ecuadorian
tropics documented dense occupations spread over thousands of years (Lippi 1998,
2004). On the southeastern fringes of the Inca empire, or perhaps more accurately
on the northwestern extremes of Guarani territory, Alconini (2004, 2008) has
documented Inca imperial strategy and its interaction with local societies at
Oroncota (Fig. 3). It is likely that the strict division between highlands and lowlands
that has often characterized a division of labor among anthropologists does not
reflect a durable division between lowland and highland peoples (Santos-Granero
2002). Modern coca chewing in Bolivia may provide an informative parallel:
although coca use is often thought of as a highland trait (Stearman 1987a), in recent
years coca has become popular among indigenous lowlanders.
Surveys along the middle Amazon, in the Xingu, in the Bolivian Amazon, and on
Marajó Island demonstrate that the population of Amazonia was in line with the
estimates provided by Denevan (2003). From the Central Amazon Project, a
sequence of large, multicomponent sites confirms the link between expanses of
anthropogenic soils and large, permanent settlement (Heckenberger et al. 1999).
Dense, sedentary populations were widespread throughout Amazonia, and new
histories of complex society in South America will incorporate Amazonian societies
as independent examples rather than foils to Andean societies (McEwan et al. 2001).
One example uniting several regions is the ubiquity of geoglyphs, ring ditches,
causeways, and large villages across southern and western Amazonia, an area
spanning thousands of kilometers (Heckenberger et al. 2008; Pärsinnen et al. 2009;
Walker 2008a). Pärsinnen and colleagues have mapped a huge area of geoglyphs—
neatly laid out earthworks or geoglyphs oriented to the cardinal directions—from
northern Bolivia through Brazil (Fig. 3). Similar ring ditches are found across
Mojos (Schaan et al. 2007; Walker 2008a). Surveys at Marajó Island (Fig. 4) show
the tremendous untapped potential of remote-sensing techniques to guide and even
replace excavation (Bevan and Roosevelt 2003; Roosevelt 2007). Groundpenetrating radar also has been put to use in eastern Brazil, at the sites of Serrano
and Morro Grande (Cezar et al. 2001). In many locations, these earthworks are
located underneath ‘‘primary growth’’ or ‘‘climax’’ tropical forest, suggesting that
what is today tropical forest may have been occupied in the past.
Southern cone
Surveys throughout the southern cone include Iriarte’s (2006a) documentation of
the nucleation of settlement in the southern Brazilian highlands about 4,000 years
ago, which represents an independent tradition of villages and ceremonial
architecture. As far from the Inca capital of Cuzco as is the Caribbean Sea, these
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results demonstrated that sophisticated economies and sociopolitical organizations
in the second millennium BC were not limited to the Andes. Iriarte’s interpretation
of settlement patterns draws persuasively on ethnographic analogy for burial
mounds as foci for communal life. Although the relationship between the
ethnographic (and ethnohistorical) record and archaeological interpretation has
been a source of conflict, this conversation has been productive. Archaeology of
settlement patterns suggests that the ethnographic and ethnohistorical information
can provide valuable analogies for archaeological interpretation, with sufficient
‘‘source-side’’ criticism.
Settlement and subsistence
Settlement survey, first put into operation in South America, is a significant chapter
in the history of processual archaeology. As South Americanists apply this
methodology from a range of theoretical perspectives, more and more preColumbian ways of life have been brought ‘‘onto the map.’’ The definition of a site
is never free of theory, and the ways in which site definition has been analyzed
(Dunnell 1992) led to the definition of landscape as part of a systemic relationship
between settlement patterns and subsistence strategies. The expansion of settlement
patterns to include ‘‘off-site’’ features such as agricultural fields, roads, paths, and
resources draws on the explanatory power of a landscape perspective to incorporate
daily, seasonal, and annual movements that are not confined within the ‘‘site.’’ The
reanalysis of the site concept began with this effort to problematize the connection
between sites and subsistence resources (Dunnell 1992). The focus of these studies
in American archaeology has been on the relationship between economy and
settlement. Several studies illustrate the explanatory power of this approach.
Connections to the ethnohistoric record have long been central to South America.
In the Andes, the applicability of ethnohistoric models to Inca and pre-Inca social
organization has been an open question. The ayllu, an Andean social unit, has been
presented both as a timeless entity and as a recent reaction to the invasive Inca state.
Isbell’s study of mortuary monuments focuses this argument on identifiable
signatures in the archaeological record (usually considered part of the ‘‘off-site’’
archaeological record) as a correlate of ethnic identity and the ayllu system of social
organization (Isbell 1997). Isbell interprets chullpas (monuments used to curate the
dead) as archaeological criteria to trace the ayllu into the Late Intermediate period.
This depends on the analysis of the ‘‘nonsite’’ archaeological record.
Landscape as a combination of settlement and agricultural patterns is used to
relate the ethnohistoric and historical record of land tenure in the central Andes
(Wernke 2006, 2007a, b). Wernke matches colonial land records to pedestrian
survey of field boundaries and the analysis of aerial photographs, coordinating all
these analyses within a GIS database. This research combines history and
anthropology to show how social organization played out on an intricate patchwork
of fields, with changing relationships between farmers, groups of farmers, and
villages. The dual organization of Andean farmers is traced both in the documents
and on the terraced slopes surrounding the village. The potential of this approach is
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difficult to overstate; it incorporates both the documentary and the material record
without privileging either.
The study of landscape as a combination of settlement and subsistence activities
is facilitated by the ubiquity and ease of use of satellite imagery. The cost of remotesensing data—and the tools to analyze them—has plunged dramatically. The same
images that cost thousands of dollars each and required esoteric knowledge of file
formats and proprietary software are now available worldwide on the internet
(Schaan et al. 2007). Archaeological features, including buildings, roads, fields,
canals, and monuments, can be mapped and cataloged from any personal computer
connected to the internet. This makes all of South America accessible to landscape
analysis. Where visibility of archaeological remains is high, remote-sensing
research has few startup costs. Grassroots efforts involving local stakeholders
could easily take advantage of these resources.
Survey, excavation, and interpretation of eastern Marajó Island, at the mouth of
the Amazon, combined the study of subsistence pattern with an inventory of
landscape features used for fish farming and management of water (Schaan 2004).
Studying landscape management and comparing it to other chiefdoms based on
nonagricultural economies, Schaan links developments in social complexity to the
Camutins, pushing back Marajó Island chronology to include these societies that did
not develop landscapes of intensive agriculture. Schaan also proposes a smaller
population (2,000) for the Camutins, noting that there were likely several such
societies on Marajó Island.
Landscape as a reflection of subsistence and settlement systems is underutilized
in landscape archaeology. Shifting focus from the definition and mapping of
archaeological sites to resources, activities, or cultural meanings opens a wide range
of theoretical questions to spatial analysis. The relative ease of access to data and
analytical tools makes these questions more amenable to archaeological research.
Conclusions
One measure of landscape archaeology is whether it creates a place where
conflicting understandings of the past can be compared and then synthesized,
reconciled, or left in opposition. Like other fields, South American archaeology is
transforming beneath the weight of an avalanche of new information. Synthesis and
analysis now depend not on heroic individuals who master larger and larger
combinations of ceramic sequences, pollen diagrams, and 17th-century archival
sources but on improving communication between specialists. Anthropologists in
general and archaeologists in particular are well positioned as guides, synthesizers,
and consensus builders; they are accustomed to reconciling data from a variety of
fields, and their interests are often rooted in particular places or problems.
Today, landscape archaeologists traverse much of the same conceptual territory
first explored in the 19th century. Because technology changed archaeological
practice, archaeologists modified their methods, and they value their hard-won field
data for good reason. But the same flood of spatial data that is overwhelming
astronomy, biology, and sociology has overtaken archaeology, and the price per unit
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(in time and money) of information is falling. Archaeologists will need to change
their role as the exclusive gatekeepers of archaeological knowledge, as they have in
the American Southwest (Fowles 2010). Landscape archaeology is most useful
when it gathers specialists and stakeholders around a map and leads them to edit and
change that map together. For ‘‘landscape’’ to be a means by which South
Americanists do this, they will have to answer several strong critiques.
Is landscape archaeology only a new methodology? This is inaccurate for two
reasons. First, reducing landscape archaeology to methodology conflates a range of
techniques with different requirements, expectations, and interpretive frameworks:
phytolith analysis, pollen analysis, faunal analysis, GIS, remote sensing, ethnography, ethnohistory, toponymy, oral history, linguistics, spatial analysis, archaeological survey, and area excavation. Second, landscape archaeologists aspire to
more than adding new methodologies to an established repertoire. Landscape
archaeologists variously claim that they are classifying indigenous perspectives on
time and space, correcting methodological biases toward sites away from certain
kinds of sites toward the top-down or the bottom-up, or documenting environmental
histories.
Can landscape archaeology be safely ignored because it is a purely North
American concern? South American landscape archaeology is hard to analyze as a
subset of Anglo-American or North American archaeology because although it is
related to academic traditions in North America, it also includes Latin American
perspectives with independent intellectual histories (Patterson 2008; Politis 2003).
Many landscape archaeologists are South Americans not trained in, or particularly
concerned with, conflicts between North American theoretical camps. Historical
perspective is essential, because archaeological practice is situated in modern
contexts that affect both archaeologists and their theories. These topics are
examined in more detail elsewhere (Liebmann and Rizvi 2008; Preucel and Hodder
1996).
Communities of archaeologists have used a landscape perspective to organize
and clarify their disagreements. Discussions between Erickson, Janusek, Kolata, and
Stanish make clearer the comparative strengths and weaknesses of a site-based and a
landscape-based perspective. Without these interchanges, both rural landscapes and
urban sites are studied but misunderstood. Cities, large sites, and monumental
constructions cannot be understood in isolation from the landscape, and the
landscape includes cities and monuments, too.
New possibilities are present in the development of GIS from a technology
(geographic information systems) into an emerging discipline (geographic information science, or GIScience) and its application in South American landscape
archaeology. GIS work can be a confrontation between the researcher, data, and a
recalcitrant computer program, with little interest outside of a narrow specialty. But
when users from landscape architecture, history, biology, and archaeology share
experiences, not only regarding their computers but with their interpretations of
spatial phenomena, they can communicate usefully about methods and results across
disciplinary gaps comparable to those between North and South American
archaeologies or between top-down and bottom-up perspectives.
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GIScience can facilitate the comparison of phenomena at different scales, and
landscape provides the theoretical link between these phenomena and anthropological issues. Studies of landscape archaeology demonstrate the importance of
medium- and small-scale studies to large-scale models. The details of plant and
animal distributions, elevation, temperature, and rainfall are important in reconstructing movements of people between continents, but also between their breakfast
and potato field, or hunting trail. Theoretical questions can be related to scale.
Comprehensive or comparative theories work at large scales, but convincing
explanations also link together individual households and cities, or river valleys and
adjacent highlands. The issue of scale requires precise terminology; for spatial
analysis, comprehensive theories like processual archaeology, cultural ecology,
sociobiology, or evolutionary psychology are large-scale ideas about how humans
behave, societies are organized, or cultures change. History, historical particularism,
and postprocessual archaeology all model smaller-scale processes and tend to
downplay large-scale ones.
One example of how landscape archaeology can graft analyses at different scales
is the reanalysis of Andean warfare as an institution, as three specific studies, in
distinct contexts and at different scales, show. Interpretations of Andean warfare,
which range widely between expressions of universal human attributes and
distinctly Andean institutions, can be compared in the light of information from the
entire landscape, not from a single scale. First, at a regional scale, Arkush (2008;
Arkush and Stanish 2005) shows how fortresses across Lake Titicaca throughout the
Late Intermediate period correspond to trends in the strategies that political actors
chose to build and maintain alliances. In combination with the expanding and
deepening knowledge of settlement, a regional map is used to analyze how
fortification consolidates power and controls political economies.
At a smaller scale, the mapping, survey, and excavations at Chankillo
demonstrate that the attribution of a defensive function to the site is the beginning
of interpretation, not the end (Ghezzi 2006; Ghezzi and Ruggles 2006, 2007). The
combination of a ‘‘defensible’’ site, importance of the location, architecture within
thick masonry walls, and artifacts recovered from within those walls and buildings
is interpreted holistically. Defensive walls cannot be understood in isolation from
the towers. The classification of a site as a ‘‘fortress’’ is based on many assumptions
about relationships with elevation, lines of sight, and proximity to resources, among
other aspects of the landscape. This definition is implicitly based on the landscape
surrounding the monumental architecture, and Ghezzi’s work makes these
assumptions explicit.
Excavation and mapping at Acaray in the Huaura Valley (Fig. 2) combine
detailed topographic mapping of the site with archaeological experiments on the
range achieved by Andean people equipped with slings (Brown Vega 2009; Brown
Vega and Craig 2009). This weapon (which is also part of an Andean shepherd’s
toolkit)—described throughout the Andes in ethnographic records and material
culture—can be discerned in the archaeological record in piles of shaped stones
behind walls. Experimental data show how the architecture at Acaray was both a
strong point and a platform to bombard besieging forces. Combined in a GIS with
analysis of sightlines from various points within the buildings, this is an excellent
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example of how spatial analysis integrates information from different sources. The
sequence of construction at the site also is brought into the analysis, which describes
long-term changes. As at Chankillo, Acaray is best interpreted in combination with
the archaeological evidence of landscape. These three studies operate at different
scales, presenting unique data defining Andean warfare. From the distribution of
strongholds across a region, to the range and striking power of sling stones, to the
lines of sight that make a location both a holy place and a defensive strongpoint,
Andean warfare was a set of military, religious, and economic practices and
institutions that focused resources, ideas, and people at particular locations; it also
was historically and geographically contingent.
Landscape archaeology encourages discussions of antagonistic theoretical views
of the same group of people, or the same set of archaeological problems, on the
same map. Landscape does not unify incompatible approaches to archaeology, but it
does make clear that to make a map is to make assumptions about time and space
and the role of society in them. Perhaps the role of landscape (and GIScience) is to
catalyze a Cartesian point of view, the better to compare and discuss descriptions of
the landscape that ‘‘don’t fit’’ into that database or that worldview. Some
Amazonians, for example, have different ways of understanding the relationships
between people, animals, and things (Santos-Granero 2009b), and relationships
between space and time. To take these conversations in cultural anthropology
seriously is to realize that Amazonian ideas about these relationships are difficult to
map (Santos-Granero 2009a). Landscape in combination with GIScience maps the
assumptions of South American archaeology, the better to contrast them with other
cartographies, histories, and archaeologies. Landscape archaeologists have specific
ideas about space, time, and people, and GIScience helps put those assumptions in
front of the scholar, the policy maker, indigenous community, landowner, or other
stakeholder.
Missed connections between North and South Americans keep South American
archaeology underdeveloped, but landscape archaeology could play a beneficial
role. A focus on environmental reconstruction and settlement patterns is necessary
because processual approaches have much to say about pre-Columbian South
America. But to focus exclusively on them distorts both the history of the field
(Politis 2003) and what we think we know about the past. North American
archaeology is in no danger of disappearing under a flood of alternative
perspectives. Well funded and well established within modern sociopolitical
structures, North American archaeologists will have an influential voice in how
landscape archaeology is carried out. Recent research in South America demonstrates that it has not been and will not be the only voice.
Perhaps this cooperation or coordination of differing perspectives is unnecessary;
the proof of landscape archaeology should rest on the results those individual
scholars and projects have generated. What has landscape archaeology told us about
pre-Columbian South America? Dillehay shows us the details of how Araucanian
mounds act in a variety of social settings, interacting with people in the world today,
as they incarnate the history of at least 700 years. Iriarte demonstrates that traditions
of public architecture, political organization, and domestication of the landscape
were not confined to the Andes. Hayashida details how agricultural spaces and
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settlements were integrated on the north coast, and that local and regional-scale
processes governed how irrigation farmers and Chimu administrators interacted.
These three scholars might not agree on a definition, but they all use landscape to
present the fruits of their analyses and cultivate new questions.
Acknowledgments My interest in landscape archaeology has grown through conversation and advice
from many friends and colleagues, in the classroom and the field: Clark Erickson, William Denevan,
Kenneth Lee, Rodolfo Pinto Parada, Wendy Ashmore, Thomas Patterson, Bernard Wailes, Robert
Langstroth, Dante Angelo, Marcello Canuto, Marcos Michel, Cynthia Robin, Jason Yaeger, Peter Stahl,
Minette Church, Zachary Christman, Richard Burger, Michael Heckenberger, Brian Bauer, Paul
Goldstein, Charles Stanish, and John Janusek. I was introduced to the Amazon on Clark Erickson’s field
projects, and to South America by Tamara Bray and James Zeidler. I thank Georgina and Jaime
Bocchietti in Bolivia for their years of hospitality. The editors and the excellent reviewers of the
manuscript must be credited for their extraordinary diligence; the remaining errors are mine.
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