Ancient Landscapes of Vicus, Peru
In the summer of 2022, I had the privilege to work as the GIS and Aerial Imagery consultant for a long-term project investigating the ancient landscapes of the Vicus area in the Upper Piura region of northern Peru. This project is directed by Dr. Alicia Boswell (University of California, Santa Barbara), Dr. Michele Koons (Denver Museum of Nature and Science), and Dr. Gabriella Cervantes (University of Pittsburgh) and is focused on understanding the Vicus area as a borderland between the coastal Indigenous groups of northern Peru and those of highland and coastal Ecuador. This first field season was focused on an aerial drone mapping program that I designed, implemented, and analyzed to record over a dozen adobe mounds and other landscape features like canals or cemeteries. I also worked in collaboration with Dr. Jennie Sturm Gunn (Statistical Research, Inc.) to integrate drone imagery with ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and magnetometry data that she collected during the same field season.
The Carabamba Archaeological Research Project (CARP)
The Carabamba Archaeological Research Project (CARP) is a recent research initiative that I have begun with Dr. Amedeo Sghinolfi (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières) to explore the prehistory of the Carabamba Highlands that served as the eastern highland border to the Moche Valley chaupiyungas. We are particularly interested in understanding the political landscape of this region during the florescence of the Kingdom of Chimor, a period that saw the rise of several large, fortified towns in the Carabamba Highlands. Were these towns the centers of highland kingdoms that were hostile to Kingdom of Chimor? Did they perhaps play a part in the epic struggle between the Kings of Chimor and the Inka Empire? With generous support from the Brennan Foundation, our pilot fieldwork in 2023-2024 targets several of these fortified towns for an aerial drone mapping program that will help us begin to answer some of these questions and guide future grant applications, fieldwork, and even excavations.
Searching for Borderland Histories of the Hacienda Menocucho
I am also interested in exploring the understudied interactions between African diaspora and Indigenous communities in the Moche Valley and its chaupiyunga borderlands during the early- and mid-Viceroyalty of Peru (1500s – 1700s CE). Trujillo was one of the first large Spanish settlements founded in the Viceroyalty, but the local Indigenous population had been decimated by a combination of (1) European diseases and (2) an earlier set of wars between the local Kingdom of Chimor and the eventually victorious Inka Empire. Though the earliest censuses (1570 – 1620 CE) of the city showed relatively modest populations of enslaved Africans, my archival research for my dissertation showed that these communities had soon grown to over a third of the population of the region by the 1700s CE. While much of this growth was around the main urban center of Trujillo, there were also several African diaspora communities working on haciendas side-by-side with Indigenous communities in the chaupiyungas up-valley. In fact, the chaupiyunga borderlands were settled by a mosaic of African diaspora, Indigenous, and mestizo communities: a historical echo of the remarkable cultural diversity I noted in the pre-historic settlement patterns of the region. I am currently doing archival work to find and explore one of these haciendas – Menocucho – to explore the histories of the African diaspora and Indigenous communities that settled the area.