The UNESCO World Heritage process for the Andean road network (completed in 2014) prompted numerous archaeological and ethnohistorical studies on pre-modern movement systems in the Andean countries. Although the roads of the Inca empire attracted the greatest academic interest, these studies also revealed the technological and chronological diversity of road infrastructures.
This symposium offers a space for discussion on the diversity of movement systems at the scale of the Americas. It also opens up tremendous potential for a comparative approach across an immense diversity of environmental, sociopolitical and cultural contexts. Such a macro-regional approach has already demonstrated its potential, notably in the books Ancient Road Networks and Settlement Hierarchies in the New World (Trombold 1991) and Landscapes of Movement (Snead et al. 2009).
Since the publication of these reference works, data sources have increased significantly: very high-resolution aerial imagery, topographic imagery (aerial photogrammetry, LiDAR, etc.), archaeological cadasters, digital repositories of historical cartography, ethnographies of mobility practices (e.g., llama caravans), among others. These sources make it possible to develop fine-grained archaeological and ethnoarchaeological approaches, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, both to record infrastructures and traces of more or less ancient movement systems and to analyze their socio-territorial configuration and chronology over the long term (beyond specific historical conjunctures), using predictive modeling, network analysis, etc. Moreover, combined with data on settlement patterns, cultural landscapes and biogeographic configurations, the study of movement systems constitutes a key approach for explaining territorial dynamics from local contexts to macro-regional scales.
We invite those who have recently carried out research on movement systems in the Americas to contribute to the symposium, with a view to preparing a new, updated collective reference book on the subject.
Thibault Saintenoy, Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit-CSIC), thibault.saintenoy@incipit.csic.es, Spain
Pablo Méndez-Quiros, University of Chile, pmendezquiros@uchile.cl, Chile
