Sacred Mountains and Glacial Archeology in the Andes (MA Thesis)
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SACRED MOUNTAINS AND GLACIAL ARCHEOLOGY IN THE ANDES ADINA E. RACOVITEANU B.A., Middlebury College, 2000 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for Masters Degree Department of Geography 2004 ADINA E. RACOVITEANU (M.A., GEOGRAPHY) SACRED MOUNTAINS AND GLACIAL ARCHEOLOGY IN THE ANDES Thesis directed by Mark W. Williams, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, University of Colorado, Boulder Archeological sites from the Inca period (15th-16th century) have been found on Andean Mountains at altitudes up to 6,700 m, including frozen mummies of Inca children. High-altitude archeologists believe that these sites were constructed for ritual purposes, to appease the Andean Mountain Gods, held responsible in local beliefs for droughts, volcanic eruptions and glacier-related hazards. Currently, these archeological sites are threatened by looting, tourism and changes in glacier cover that may expose the artifacts to decomposition. There is a need to develop new tools to identify archeologically sensitive areas to guide archeological fieldwork at high altitudes. This thesis proposes to identify recurring spatial patterns of archeological sites using the existing survey data, multivariate statistical analysis and the latest geo-visualization tools. Here I argue that the location of the ritual sites is related to environmental and social factors such as topography, climate and accessibility. First, I review existing hypotheses about archeological site location and I construct a spatial inventory of the archeological sites found to the present day. I then present the construction of the digital elevation model (DEM), and the development of the key environmental and social factors associated with high altitude archeological sites. Possible Inca access routes are reconstructed using least cost path algorithms and topographic data from the DEM, and validated with climbing routes surveyed during fieldwork. I then develop an archeological predictive model using a combination of univariate statistics, logistic regression, and the spatial analysis capabilities of GIS. The model is validated on Nevados Coropuna (6,426 m) and Pichu Pichu (5,650 m), two sacred mountains in the Peruvian Andes. I surveyed these mountains in two field expeditions in 2003, and located Inca ruins, tombs and a mummy. Using these data, the model predictions are compared against with actual locations of the sites recorded in the field, with the goal of refining the model. "*-.6 +$#&,$-32 The research was supported by the NSF/IGERT- sponsored graduate training program entitled Carbon, Climate and Society Initiative (CCSI) at University of Colorado. I am grateful to my thesis committee members: Mark Williams, William Manley, James Dixon, Jeremy Mennis and John M. Malville for providing advice. I thank the Global Land and Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) team for facilitating free access to ASTER data through the NASA ESE Pathfinder project; the USGS EROS Data Center for providing SRTM and ASTER elevation datasets; the Glaciology Unit at Intituto Nacional de Recursos Naturales (INRENA) in Huaraz, Peru, for providing logistical assistance, and the UNAVCO facility in Boulder for assisting with GPS corrections. I am grateful to all the research teams who offered their collaboration during fieldwork: l’Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, France (GREAT ICE project), for supporting my participation in the ice-core drilling expedition on Coropuna in June 2003; Jean-Claude Thouret, Jean-Claude Thouret, Laboratoire Magmas et Volcans, Université Blaise Pascal, France for collaboration; archeologists Mariusz Ziólkowski from University of Warsovia (Proyecto arqueológico Condensuyo) and Jose Antonio Chávez Chávez from Universidad Católica Santa María de Arequipa, for providing archeological guidance, and Arcadio Mamani, mountain guide, Arequipa, for assisting with fieldwork. iii ".-3$-32 CHAPTER ONE....................................................................................................................1 INTRODUCTION.......................................................................................................................1 I.1 Sacred Mountains .........................................................................................................1 I.2 Mountain rituals at risk.................................................................................................2 I.3 Archeological predictive modeling overview...............................................................5 I.4 Research design and objectives ....................................................................................9 I.5 Organization of the thesis ...........................................................................................11 CHAPTER TWO...................................................................................................................12 HIGH-ALTITUDE ARCHEOLOGY: THE CONTEXT ...................................................................12 II.1 Introduction ...............................................................................................................12 II.2 The cultural context...................................................................................................13 II.3 Existing hypotheses...................................................................................................22 II.4 Conclusions ...............................................................................................................30 CHAPTER THREE ..............................................................................................................31 EVALUATING DIGITAL ELEVATION MODELS FOR GLACIOLOGIC APPLICATIONS: AN EXAMPLE FROM NEVADO COROPUNA, PERUVIAN ANDES ..................................................31 III.1 Introduction...........................................................................................................31 III.2 Study area..............................................................................................................34 III.3 MethodS ................................................................................................................35 III.4 Results and discussion...........................................................................................38 III.5 Conclusions and further applications ....................................................................55 CHAPTER FOUR .................................................................................................................57 CONSTRUCTION OF A SPATIAL DATABASE FOR HIGH-ALTITUDE ARCHEOLOGY IN THE ANDES..................................................................................................................................57 IV.1 Introduction..............................................................................................................57 IV.2 Construction of the spatial database ........................................................................59 IV.3 Results and discussion .............................................................................................67 IV.4 Conclusions..............................................................................................................76 CHAPTER FIVE...................................................................................................................78 ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH HIGH ALTITUDE ARCHEOLOGICAL SITES IN THE ANDES .................................................................................78 V.1 Introduction...............................................................................................................78 V.2 Methods.....................................................................................................................80 V.3 Results and discussion...............................................................................................85 V.4 Conclusions ..........................................................................................................................99 ii CHAPTER SIX....................................................................................................................101 RECONSTRUCTING INCA CLIMBING ROUTES USING LEAST COST PATH ANALYSIS ............101 VI.1 Introduction............................................................................................................101 VI.2 Methods .................................................................................................................105 VI.3 Results....................................................................................................................112 VI.4 Discussion..............................................................................................................123 VI.5 Conclusions and further applications.....................................................................124 CHAPTER SEVEN .............................................................................................................125 PREDICTIVE MODELING FOR HIGH-ALTITUDE ARCHEOLOGICAL SITES IN THE ANDES ......125 VII.1 Introduction ..........................................................................................................125 VII.2 Methods ................................................................................................................126 VII.3 Results ..................................................................................................................128