Parker Vanvalkenburgh

Brown University · Department of Anthropology

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have profoundly transformed the field of remote sensing, revolutionizing data collection, processing, and analysis. Traditionally reliant on manual interpretation and task-specific models, remote sensing has been significantly enhanced by the advent of foundation models--large-scale, pre-trained AI models c...

Agricultural terraces have a number of attributes that make them useful for managing erosion, shaping hydrology, and enhancing agricultural productivity. These characteristics, as well as their widespread construction by pre-industrial agricultural societies, have made them popular elements of plans to develop "sustainable" agriculture, both throug...

Changes in land-use practices have been a central element of human adaptation to Holocene climate change. Many practices that result in the short-term stabilization of socio-natural systems, however, have longer-term, unanticipated consequences that present cascading challenges for human subsistence strategies and opportunities for subsequent adapt...

We combined datasets from multiple research projects and remote sensing technologies to evaluate conservation conditions at La Fortaleza de Kuelap, a pre-Hispanic site in Peru that suffered significant damage under heavy seasonal rains in April 2022. To identify the causes of the collapse and where the monument is at further risk, we modeled surfac...

In this article, we combine datasets from multiple research projects and remote sensing tech-nologies to evaluate the conservation conditions of La Fortaleza de Kuelap, a pre-Hispanic monument in Peru’s northeastern Andes that suffered significant damage during historically high seasonal rains in April 2022. Our analyses seek to identify the main c...

In this article, we combine datasets from multiple research projects and remote sensing tech-nologies to evaluate the conservation conditions of La Fortaleza de Kuelap, a pre-Hispanic monument in Peru’s northeastern Andes that suffered significant damage during historically high seasonal rains in April 2022. Our analyses seek to identify the main c...

The north coast of Peru is among the most extensively surveyed regions in the world, yet variation in research questions, sampling strategies and chronological and geospatial controls among survey projects makes comparison of disparate datasets difficult. To contextualise these issues, the authors present a systematic survey of satellite imagery fo...

Archaeological surveys conducted through the inspection of high-resolution satellite imagery promise to transform how archaeologists conduct large-scale regional and supra-regional research. However, conducting manual surveys of satellite imagery is labour- and time-intensive, and low target prevalence substantially increases the likelihood of miss...

Recent archaeological research in the Andes suggests that Indigenous herders carefully managed their environments through the modification of local hydrology and vegetation. However, the limited geographical scale of previous research makes it challenging to assess the range and prevalence of pastoralist land management in the Andes. In this articl...

Fog oases ( lomas ) present pockets of verdant vegetation within the arid coastal desert of Andean South America and archaeological excavation within some of the oases has revealed a long history of human exploitation of these landscapes. Yet lomas settlements are under-represented in archaeological datasets due to their tendency to be located in r...

Imagery-based survey is capable of producing archaeological datasets that complement those collected through field-based survey methods, widening the scope of analysis beyond regions. The Geospatial Platform for Andean Culture, History and Archaeology (GeoPACHA) enables systematic registry of imagery survey data through a ‘federated’ approach. Usin...

Archaeology has long faced fundamental issues of sampling and scalar representation. Traditionally, the local-to-regional-scale views of settlement patterns are produced through systematic pedestrian surveys. Recently, systematic manual survey of satellite and aerial imagery has enabled continuous distributional views of archaeological phenomena at...

Light detection and ranging (Lidar) technology is having wide-ranging impacts in archaeology, especially in the tropics. Using modern, high pulse-rate lidar systems, coupled with advanced Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) and high-resolution GPS receivers, archaeologists have mapped forested landscapes to reveal that the full extents of many ancien...

La política de reducción es conocida como una de las medidas más drásticas de la colonización española en sus dominios de América. Se trató de concentrar o «reducir» aldeas pequeñas y dispersas, para formar pueblos de mayor envergadura y con traza urbana. Este proyecto, ejecutado por funcionarios civiles y eclesiásticos, tuvo como objetivos el cont...

This paper analyzes remotely sensed data sources to evaluate land-use history within the Peruvian department of Amazonas and demonstrates the utility of comparing present and past land-use patterns using continuous datasets, as a complement to the often dispersed and discrete data produced by archaeological and paleoecological field studies. We cha...

We seek to highlight how paleoecology, archaeology, and geoecology can add to the repertoires of ecotourism guides in Peru's Chachapoya region, providing informed portraits of the history of cloud forest ecology in Peru's northeastern Andes and raising concerns about the future conservation of these mountainscapes under human impact.

This is a statement on sexual harassment and community values signed by eight members of the Northeast Conference on Andean Archaeology and Ethnohistory (NCAAE)

Archaeologists study many phenomena that scale beyond even our most geographically expansive field methodologies. The promise of collecting archaeologically relevant data beyond the scale of regional surveys is among the most exciting prospects of the "data revolution." Yet previous efforts have either struggled to generate high-quality data within...

We report the results of drone lidar survey at a high-elevation archaeological site in the Chachapoyas region of Peruvian Amazonia. Unlike traditional airborne remote sensing, drone lidar produces very high-density measurements at a wide range of scan angles by operating at low altitudes and slow flight speeds. These measurements can resolve near v...

Big data have arrived in archaeology, in the form of both large-scale datasets themselves and in the analytics and approaches of data science. Aerial data collected from satellite-, airborne- and UAV-mounted sensors have been particularly transformational, allowing us to capture more sites and features, over larger areas, at greater resolution, and...

Chapter 14 combines archaeological and documentary data to study post-Conquest demographic collapse in the early Colonial Period in the lower Zaña Valley on the Peruvian north coast. The authors use results of their excavations in two sectors at Carrizales, one dating to Late Sicán, near the end the prehispanic sequence, and one to the early Coloni...

This study explores the politics of indigenous foodways in early colonial Peru, examining the processes by which indigenous households adapted to demographic stress, resettlement, and evangelization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries CE. We examine faunal and botanical data from two planned towns (reducciones) located in Peru’s Zaña Valley—...

I reflect on how the series of essays in this themed issue map out an emerging orientation in Andeanist archaeology, the transconquest perspective. Growing out of scholars’ engagements with the local dimensions of Inka and Spanish rule and the methodological and ontological divides that distinguish “history” and “prehistory,” the transconquest pers...

This study utilizes multi‐isotopic analysis to reconstruct diet and source‐water consumption from human remains collected at Carrizales, in the Zaña Valley of northern coastal Peru. Carrizales is a multi‐component site that encompasses the remains of 1) Early Intermediate Period (200‐800 CE) cemeteries (Conjuntos 126 and 127); 2) Late Sicán/Lambaye...

In this essay, we examine the potentials and challenges of mobile computing for a core activity of archaeological laboratory research—the typological analysis of ceramics. We discuss the collaborative development, implementation, and evaluation of the PAZC Ceramics module in the FAIMS Mobile platform. Our deployment of the module yielded significan...

This study presents the results of instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA), laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and thin-section analysis of 74 majolica sherds from 16th-18th Century sites in the Zaña Valley and Magdalena de Cao Viejo, Peru, and Panama Viejo, Panama. The majority of majolica samples from...

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Through Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) microstructural analysis, we examine the firing technology of Early Green Glazed (EGG) Ware, a variety of " hybrid " lead-glazed ceramics produced in Peru's north coast region during the 16th century CE. Previous scholars have interpreted EGG Ware as the product of indigenous potters who fired ceramics in...

In this paper, I explore the politics of memory during the Toledan reforms—a series of ambitious administrative changes legislated in colonial Peru between 1569 and 1581, by viceroy Francisco de Toledo. At the center of Toledo's project was an initiative to resettle the entire native population of the audiencias of Lima and Charcas into a series of...

The Federated Archaeological Information Management Systems (FAIMS) Project is an Australian, university-based initiative developing a generalized, open-source mobile data collection platform that can be customized for diverse archaeological activities. Three field directors report their experiences adapting FAIMS software to projects in Turkey, Ma...

We present the results of instrumental neutron activation analysis of ceramics recovered from the Solomon Islands, associated with Alvaro de Mendaña y Neira’s 16th century colonizing expedition to the region (c.1595–6). Based on the chemical and typological data and previously published petrological and geochronological research, this study assigns...

Through analysis of zooarchaeological remains from two occupations at the site of Carrizales, we examine how an indigenous Peruvian maritime community responded to imperial interventions in their daily lives in the late sixteenth century. Following their forced resettlement into a planned reducción village, and amidst demographic decline and tribut...

In this paper, we characterize the production and circulation of Early Green Glazed (EGG) Ware, an innovative variety of lead-glazed ceramics produced in Peru’s North Coast region in the wake of the Spanish colonization of the Andes. INAA of pastes and LA-ICP-MS of glazes of EGG Ware samples collected from sites in Peru’s Zaña, and Chicama river va...

In this study, we utilize ground-penetrating radar and gradiometer survey to map buried architecture and investigate the political dimensions of the built environment at two Spanish colonial period archaeological sites in Peru's north coast region, Carrizales (C123) and Mocupe Viejo (74). Based on historical sources, we argue that both sites were f...

The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture. Card Jeb J. , editor. 2013. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 39. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale. 524 pp. $50.00 (paperback), ISBN 0-8093-3314-7. - Volume 79 Issue 4 - Parker VanValkenburgh

Archaeological studies of political life have often assumed that the control of territory is an inherent aspect of social power, particularly within complex polities. Frustration with the rigid territorialism of archaeological approaches to politics has fostered enthusiasm for alternative models of political space, including networks. While we conc...