The Archaeology of Plazas and the Proxemics of Ritual: Three Andean Traditions

Abstract

Plazas are culturally significant elements in the built environment, spaces for social interactions. This essay outlines a model for the archaeological investigation of prehistoric plazas that examines the relationships between ritual communication, thresholds of human sense perceptions, and constructed spaces. The model is applied to a sample of pre-Hispanic Andean plazas and three traditions are identified, each with discrete spatial properties and communicative potentials.