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Cultural Niche Construction and Remote Sensing of Ancient Anthropogenic Environmental Change in the North Coast of Peru

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Abstract

Archaeological land use results in the modification of natural environments according to cultural templates and strategies. Deeply entrenched environmental legacies can result from such “niche construction,” influencing subsequent cultures and continuing to resonate in modern ecological function. These changes can be better understood through archaeological remote sensing.

Here, I describe spectral responses of densely vegetated sugarcane fields in the Chicama Valley (north coast of Peru) to archaeological features and associated anthropogenic soils (anthrosols). Ongoing satellite remote sensing documents approximately 440 previously unrecorded major archaeological monuments and smaller features within a 310 km2 sample of the Chicama Valley The majority of these date to the Moche–Chimu periods (ca. AD 300–1400), with others dating to the Cupisnique–Colonial periods. The newly recorded features are significant for accurately reconstructing the socio-ecological history of anthropogenic environmental change in the region.

In addition to advancing analyses of archaeological settlement, these results reveal how prehispanic land use legacies result in persistent anthropogenic niches that can affect modern agricultural potentials. The relationships between anthropogenic features and sugarcane development can be directly evaluated through vegetation indices and physically based image transforms. Phenological response is linked to long-term alterations in soil texture, organic-matter content, and moisture capacity. Past land use thus has a significant impact upon contemporary ecological function, resulting in anthropogenic microenvironments. As sugarcane increasingly is an important industrial crop, these results have the potential to be widely applied to archaeological and agronomic problems, including reconstructions of archaeological landscapes, understanding persistent anthropogenic environments, and mitigating heritage loss while potentially improving precision agriculture.

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Acknowledgements

ASTER L1B and Landsat ETM+ data products were obtained through the online Reverb Data Pool at the NASA Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC), USGS/Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. WorldView-2 data provided to the project by Dr. Compton Tucker, NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center. UAVSAR data are courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech. Field support was generously provided by the Fundación Wiese. I am grateful to Dan Contreras and Julia Fan for comments on earlier version of this paper.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Arkansas–Fayetteville, Old Main 330, Fayetteville, AR, 72701, USA

    Benjamin R. Vining

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Portions of this research were funded by a NASA-Roses Space Archaeology Grant 11-SAP11-0004 to co-PIs William Saturno and Tom Sever

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Vining, B.R. Cultural Niche Construction and Remote Sensing of Ancient Anthropogenic Environmental Change in the North Coast of Peru. J Archaeol Method Theory 25, 559–586 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-017-9346-y

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