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Managing pastoral landscapes: remote survey of herding infrastructure in Huancavelica, Peru

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2023

Bethany Whitlock*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, USA
Parker Van Valkenburgh
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, USA
Steven A. Wernke
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA
*
*Author for correspondence ✉ bethany_whitlock@brown.edu
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Abstract

Recent archaeological research in the Andes suggests that Indigenous herders carefully managed their environments through the modification of local hydrology and vegetation. However, the limited geographical scale of previous research makes it challenging to assess the range and prevalence of pastoralist land management in the Andes. In this article, the authors utilise large-scale, systematic imagery survey to examine the distribution and environmental contexts of corrals and pastoralist settlements in Huancavelica, Peru. Results indicate that corrals and pastoralist settlements cluster around colonial and present-day settlements and that a statistically significant relationship exists between pastoral infrastructure and perennial vegetation. This highlights the utility of remote survey for the identification of trans-regional patterns in herder-environment relationships that are otherwise difficult to detect.

Information

Type
Special section: GeoPACHA
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - SA
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is included and the original work is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd
Figure 0

Figure 1. Map showing location of Huancavelica and survey zone (figure by the authors).

Figure 1

Figure 2. Examples of corrals (top row) and estancias (bottom row) in satellite imagery. Coloured dots indicate sites recorded in GeoPACHA (figure by the authors).

Figure 2

Figure 3. Elevation distributions of survey quads, corrals and estancias compared with the digital elevation model (DEM) of the study region; ‘pts’ indicates the points recorded in GeoPACHA (figure by the authors).

Figure 3

Figure 4. Optimised hot-spot analysis of corrals (figure by the authors).

Figure 4

Figure 5. Optimised hot-spot analysis of estancias (figure by the authors).

Figure 5

Table 1. Elevation, NDVI and NDVSI values for corral and estancia hot spots and cold spots in comparison to values for the contiguous survey zone as a whole.

Figure 6

Table 2. Elevation, NDVI and NDVSI values for corrals, estancias and random points (RP) over the entire survey area.