Ecological variation and early village organization in formative cusco, peru: A GIS-based approach

Abstract

We utilize GIS to analyze regional settlement survey data to understand the transition to agropastoral village life in the Cusco region of highland Peru during the Late Formative Period (600 BCE − 200 CE) and long-term success of settlements on the landscape. We model cost catchment areas within 1, 2, and 4 h of travel from each of the eight largest Formative villages in the study region. We take into consideration the different ecozones each of these communities would have access to as well as the amount of potentially arable farmland within each catchment. To examine relationships between village locations and accessibility to other Formative settlements, we quantify the sites within each travel area and examine portions of the landscape where areas overlap. We also model viewsheds and cumulative visibility for each settlement to consider how visibility of the surrounding landscape and neighboring communities might have informed the selection and growth of certain sites. These data highlight 4 clusters or zones of interaction within the study region where established villages differ in terms of their accessibility, proximity, and overlap to smaller villages: 1) the Xaquixaguana Basin around Lake Huaypo, 2) the Chit’apampa Basin, 3) the transverse valleys to the north of the Sacred Valley, and 4) the Sacred Valley. Although we cannot presume the contemporaneity and continuous occupation of all settlements throughout the Late Formative Period, these data provide testable archaeological hypotheses as to how early villagers navigated different local landscapes as they developed agropastoral subsistence strategies, and how their social interactions shaped the coalescence of permanent villages. Some of these settlements grew to be significantly larger and continued to be occupied in subsequent periods, suggesting that the proximity and placement of sites on these landscapes influenced occupational trajectories and regional sociopolitics. Ultimately, we conclude that large sites settled in areas with access to arable farmland to cultivate maize and that had reduced risk of frost continued to be occupied past the Formative. Our results highlight the utility of synchronic analyses of survey data to generate testable hypotheses about long-term settlement continuity in ecologically diverse regions.