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- Title
From Ancient Altepetl to Modern Municipios: Surveying as Power in Colonial Guatemala.
- Authors
Sampeck, Kathryn
- Abstract
A key way colonists gained control of a region was through cartography. Although colonial maps have seen a great deal of study, the process of making the map through surveying has not, even though surveying of metes-and-bounds was a crucial step in establishing legal control and for making a map. The comparison of written descriptions of an eighteenth-century survey in the Izalcos region of colonial Guatemala with archaeological data illustrates that surveying was an intimately social process. The ultimate tool for implementing state hegemony was for officials to dictate an authoritative perception of the landscape, but arriving at that perception was a contested, contentious procedure. Although maps ostensibly resulted from scientific, objective measurement, stakeholders negotiated among themselves about the truth of measurements and values, the perception of the landscape. Surveys could be so contentious that no one drew a map. This eighteenth-century survey is one example of how the people enacted the state in their lives, and this process was by no means straightforward, even when following standard practices critical for the maintenance of state power.
- Subjects
CARTOGRAPHY; SURVEYING (Engineering); GUATEMALAN history, to 1821; POWER (Social sciences); IMPERIALISM; HISTORY; ENGINEERING &; society
- Publication
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2014, Vol 18, Issue 1, p175
- ISSN
1092-7697
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s10761-013-0251-0