Anthropology Department Proseminar Series Faculty Presentation: Dr. Oré Menéndez
When
Campus Location
Office/Remote Location
Description
Title: Circuit Analysis and Indigenous Territorial Reconstruction in the Huarochirí Manuscript
Abstract: Colonial administrative maps impose fixed boundaries onto territories that Indigenous communities understood through movement, relationship, and encounter. To model this relational spatial logic without collapsing it into colonial administrative units, I use circuit theory – a connectivity model originally developed in landscape ecology to compute multiple overlapping pathways simultaneously across a landscape. Where conventional archaeological uses of landscape modeling suggest a single optimal route between two points, circuit analysis generates a continuous conductivity surface that registers the probability of movement and connection across competing terrain. Applied to the Quechua Huarochirí Manuscript's narrative geography, circuit analysis recovers the contested borderlands between rival shrine networks, detects internal hierarchies within politically undifferentiated groups, and converts textual attention into measurable spatial patterns. The result demonstrates how colonial-period narratives can be read as spatial data in their own right – offering not just an interpretation of sixteenth-century Andean territoriality, but a methodological framework for reconciling Indigenous spatial ontologies with archaeological analysis.
Admission Information
Open to all. No tickets needed.