Authors
Graham Goodwin, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Kristy E Primeau, David E Witt
Publication date
2018/4/11
Journal
83rd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Washington, DC
Description
[SLIDE 1] For decades now, researchers have been applying GIS to examine the roles of visibility and movement in the past (Doyle, Garrison, and Houston 2012; Gillings 2015; Kanter and Hobgood 2016; Kosiba and Bauer 2013; Landau 2015; Llobera 2001, 2003, 2006, 2007; Richards-Rissetto 2010, 2012, 2017; Richards-Rissetto and Landau 2014; Sullivan 2017; Wheatley and Gillings 2000). However, few studies have investigated the role sound potentially played in structuring experience in ancient landscapes. To begin to fill this gap, this paper builds on our initial investigations into Sensory GIS (Goodwin and Richards-Rissetto 2017; Primeau and Witt, In Press; Witt and Primeau 2017) to develop new geospatial methods and virtual reality applications to examine ancient acoustics in conjunction with vision. Our case study is the ancient Maya.[SLIDE 2] For the ancient Maya, sound worked in concert with other senses to create experiences that influenced daily life and shaped society. The Maya regarded the senses as invisible phenomena that invested life and meaning to spaces (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006). Sensory organs like eyes were believed to possess a form of agency as illustrated by the protruding eyeballs on this slide. Sight was believed to have a witnessing function and an authorizing gaze as well as affording high status. Scripts were meant to be read aloud and speech and sound scrolls illustrate the importance of changing volume in vocal readings or performance. Researchers have argued that Maya art and architecture was a means of bringing together the senses to structure experiences that communicated cultural …
Total citations
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Scholar articles
G Goodwin, H Richards-Rissetto, KE Primeau, DE Witt - 83rd Annual Meeting of the Society for American …, 2018