Visibility and Power: Preliminary Analysis of Social Control on a Bandanese Plantation Compound, Eastern Indonesia

Abstract

This article evaluates the extent to which the architectural organization of a Dutch plantation compound was designed to aid in plantation administrators’ and owners’ ability to engage in acts of social control via surveillance. The particular compound, Groot Walling, is located on Banda Besar, the largest of the Banda Islands, Maluku Province, Indonesia. Our initial hypothesis is that the compound was designed to aid in surveillance activity by administrators against slaves and contract workers. After discussing the history of the islands and prior historical archaeological research into surveillance, we employ GIS-based visibility analysis to evaluate this hypothesis. A series of single viewsheds were calculated within Groot Walling and compared against viewsheds generated from hypothetical organizations of that same compound. The results, while preliminary, are not consistent with our hypothesis, and we tentatively reject it. We follow up these results with some exploratory analyses, utilizing a series of total viewsheds to try to better characterize the visual properties of this compound. We then suggest some alternative hypotheses for our results, and end with a discussion of future research directions.

Hillforts and Power in the British Post-Roman West: A GIS Analysis of Dinas Powys

“…Foucault (1977: 195-230), for instance, argued that power over individuals could be achieved through the creation of panoptic surveillance mechanisms. Such ideas of surveillance existed in the nineteenth century, as extolled in Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, a prison designed to 'induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power' (Foucault, 1977: 201; for archaeological applications of these ideas, see Carlson & Jordan, 2014;Pierce & Matisziw, 2018). We do not contend that landscapes could be organized in such a way that they operated precisely like a panopticon but assert that visual domination can operate as a method of social control (Giddens, 1985: 14-15).…”

Prehistoric Panopticon: Settlement Visibility at Ancient Cahokia Mounds

“…Furthermore, using GIS technology allows us to maintain a quantitative approach void of preconceptions (Fleming, 2006). The Panopticon design has been explored in the field of archaeology on rare occasions (i.e., Carlson & Jordan, 2013; Leone, 1995; Randle, 2011), yet few studies have applied this approach to prehistory (see, Graves & Van Keuren, 2011, for exception). We are further unaware of any study in which a Panopticon approach has been examined through quantitative analysis for a prehistoric settlement.…”