Interregional Archaeology in the Age of Big Data: Building Online Collaborative Platforms for Virtual Survey in the Andes

Abstract

Archaeologists study many phenomena that scale beyond even our most geographically expansive field methodologies. The promise of collecting archaeologically relevant data beyond the scale of regional surveys is among the most exciting prospects of the "data revolution." Yet previous efforts have either struggled to generate high-quality data within expansive regions or to use well-edited interregional datasets to address novel research questions. We discuss the development of two collaborative research projects that seek to address these problems-GeoPACHA (Geospatial Platform for Andean Culture, History and Archaeology) and LOGAR (Linked Open Gazetteer of the Andean Region). The former is an online platform facilitating virtual archaeological survey of satellite and historical aerial imagery; the latter collates primary source information on Andean places. We illustrate the potential of both tools through presentation and analysis of a comprehensive basemap of the planned colonial towns built during a mass resettlement program instituted in the viceroyalty of Peru in the 1570s C.E.

Eyes of the machine: AI-assisted satellite archaeological survey in the Andes

“…Presence/ absence data may flag areas of interest for further investigation by specialists, but without specialist intervention applications are limited to broad and atemporal settlement pattern analyses. Other research programs, such as the CORONA Atlas project and GeoPACHA (Casana & Cothren 2013;Wernke et al 2020), rely on trained specialists to ensure the quality of the collected data and provide deeper and richer metadata about the observations made. To date, these methods have proven highly effective in identifying archaeological features over vast areas but remain time-consuming and require team members to have significant training and domain knowledge.…”

“…Traditional pedestrian surveys covering many thousands of square kilometres can be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, especially when conducted in physically challenging landscapes such as the central Andean cordillera. In contrast, manual satellite prospection allows archaeologists to efficiently survey hundreds of thousands of square kilometres for visible features and to generate reliable data (Casana & Cothren 2013;Ur 2013;Parcak 2017Parcak , 2019Wernke et al 2020). Furthermore, it allows regions that were once geographically or politically inaccessible to be investigated through the inspection of freely available satellite imagery (Casana & Cothren 2013).…”

“…In contrast, manual satellite prospection allows archaeologists to efficiently survey hundreds of thousands of square kilometres for visible features and to generate reliable data (Casana & Cothren 2013; Ur 2013; Parcak 2017, 2019; Wernke et al . 2020). Furthermore, it allows regions that were once geographically or politically inaccessible to be investigated through the inspection of freely available satellite imagery (Casana & Cothren 2013).…”

Explosive Expansion, Sociotechnical Diversity, and Fragile Sovereignty in the Domain of the Inka

“…Imperial roads regulated and limited certain state-sanctioned flows of people and things by enclosing them within a centrally-designed and monitored network of nodes and edges. Graph theoretic and spatial network analyses of the road system strongly indicate that it was optimized to connect Cuzco and regional centers such as Hatunqolla [48] , Vilcashuamán [69,138] , Hatun Xauxa [18,139,140] , and Pumpu [64,70] , rather than optimizing the articulation of imperial centers vis-à-vis the agro-pastoral and settlement systems of subject populations at locality and regional scales [69,141,142] . That is to say, the imperial network optimized inter-regional articulation of top tier imperial centers and the capital city.…”

Linking Past and Present Land-Use Histories in Southern Amazonas, Peru

“…To establish the locations of ancient terraces and to evaluate their relationships with areas of modern forest clearance, we conducted "virtual" archaeological survey using the Geospatial Platform for Andean Culture, History, and Archaeology (GeoPACHA) [79]. GeoPACHA is a browser-based platform designed to facilitate systematic visual survey and analysis of high resolution aerial imagery for archaeological applications.…”