Abstract
Fieldwork at Tiwanaku sites in recent decades has opened new avenues of inquiry into the characteristics of the Tiwanaku polity, but archaeology has been hampered by the inability to make large-scale characterizations of the organization of urban and monumental space because of the depositional processes that interred its cities and monuments. In this paper, we use several geophysical techniques, including magnetometry, electrical resistivity, and ground-penetrating radar to begin to visualize some of these spaces. In doing so, we outline a methodology for recreating the urban spatial structure of the six-square-kilometer Tiwanaku capital. Our preliminary work compares excavations at the Putuni, Mollo Kontu, and Akapana East sectors with geophysical data that has expanded our understanding of both residential and monumental spaces to provide a first glimpse at the potential of imaging Tiwanaku’s buried urban structure.
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Williams, P.R., Couture, N., Blom, D. (2006). Urban Structure at Tiwanaku: Geophysical Investigations in the Andean Altiplano. In: Wiseman, J., El-Baz, F. (eds) Remote Sensing in Archaeology. Interdisciplinary Contributions To Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-44455-6_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-44455-6_17
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