Spirit roads of Taraco : a geographic information systems approach to the archaeology and ethnography of the Andean Plateau
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Despite long traditions of landscape and ethnoarchaeological research in the Andes, these two traditions are rarely combined into a landscape ethnoarchaeology. My thesis fills this gap by evaluating contemporary Aymara landscape knowledge obtained through interviews to interpret spatial patterns in archaeological data collected from the Andean Plateau. I derive relevant variables from 13 interviews with Aymara speakers and integrate them with a set of ArcGIS point features that represent the archaeological sites of Bolivia's Taraco Peninsula in a Geographic Information System (GIS) framework, all courtesy of the Taraco Archaeological Project (TAP). Theoretically, this thesis combines the landscape and memory theory of Basso (1996), Van Dyke (2008), and Zedeno (2008) with an archaeology of materiality (Meskell 2008) and utilizes a qualitative GIS method that provides a means of analyzing subjective data gathered from interviews in the quantitative space of a GIS. By combining Aymara knowledge and archaeological data in a GIS framework, I will correlate modern Aymara spatial understandings of the landscape with spatial distribution of archaeological sites, revealing how patterns align between Aymara knowledge of the landscape and previous landscape archaeological analysis in the Southern Titicaca Basin.
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M.A.