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.
\nThis 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).
\nSince the publication of these reference works, data sources have increased significantly: very high-resolution aerial imagery, topographic imagery, archaeological cadasters, digital repositories of historical cartography, ethnographies of non-motorized mobility practices (e.g., llama caravans), among others. These sources often allow for the development of fine-grained archaeological and ethnoarchaeological approaches, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, both to record the infrastructures and traces of more or less ancient movement systems and to analyze their socio-territorial configuration and their chronology over the long term (beyond specific historical conjunctures). Moreover, when combined with data on settlement patterns, cultural landscapes and biogeographic configurations, the analysis of movement systems constitutes a key approach for studying territorial dynamics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","simposio_area":[46],"class_list":["post-10333","simposio","type-simposio","status-publish","hentry","simposio_area-arqueologia"],"yoast_head":"\n