‘In Flat Country’: A Space-Time Approach to the Common Spanish League

Although widely used throughout the territories colonized by Europeans, the colonial league remains difficult to consistently translate to a unit of distance. Attempts to convert the league to modern units have returned varied results, depending on where and when distances were reported. This confusion seems to be the result of a conflation of the league as a unit of distance and the league as a measurement of space-time. The common league, used frequently in travel accounts and guidebooks through the 18th century, was loosely defined as the distance a man could walk in 1 h. As a result, the common league is resistant to consistent quantification in terms of Euclidean distance. For historical archaeologists seeking to identify sites from archival documents or maps, this inconsistency can make it difficult to move outward from known sites. In this article, I examine the utility of Tobler's hiking function and minimum travel time to approximate the common league. To do so, I compare travel time results with reported common leagues along two segments of Spain's royal highway in South America: one flat and one hilly. The results suggest that in both flat and hilly terrain, travel time serves as a more reliable predictor of known sites than previously proposed linear distances. These results also direct attention to the fact that spatial knowledge in the colonial period was gathered through human experiences of movement, experiences that were often subsequently erased or obscured in the process of mapping and tabulating distance.