Anna Cohen – Piecing Together the Legacy and Remote Data Puzzle: Architecture and Monumentality in Eastern Honduras

In our era of remote sensing archaeology and legacy datasets, multiple lines of evidence should be integrated to document a landscape-view of rapidly disappearing Indigenous landscapes. This study brings together several datasets derived from airborne lidar, satellite imagery, and pedestrian survey to present a large-scale (>650 km²) synthesis of the archaeology of the Wampu River system, a part of eastern Honduras with a long but inconsistent history of research. Results include the identification of numerous unreported archaeological sites, a basic classificatory scheme for site organization, and emerging patterns in site orientation. In this presentation, I show how eastern Honduras has the potential for future research identifying extensive settlements in the centuries before European arrival, thus contributing to a more complex understanding of Indigenous populations in the Americas. 

Speaker Anna Cohen is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Florida State University. She received her PhD and MA in Anthropology from the University of Washington, her MA from the University of Chicago, and her BA from McGill University. Dr. Cohen uses remote sensing techniques, such as lidar and ceramic analyses, to investigate how pre-contact communities adapted to political changes in the centuries before European arrival in the Americas. She conducts field and lab work in non-Maya Honduras, western Mesoamerica, and precontact and historic Utah.