Using GIS for Politywide Analysis of Wari Imperial Political Economy

Empires are massive, complex, political entities that present formidable challenges to traditional scales of archaeological analysis. Since empires extend across political boundaries, exchange systems, and environmental zones, the politywide extension of findings from settlement surveys and site excavations is problematic. No locality, no matter how intensively studied, can serve as an imperial microcosm. To study empires, politywide analysis is also necessary. Successful analysis at this level must integrate both local and regional scales of analysis from data collected by multiple researchers working on different projects. Geographic information system (GIS) provides an information infrastructure permitting organization of such disparate data scales (Zubrow 1990, Crumley and Marquardt 1990: 73–74). In this paper, we will demonstrate the utility of politywide analysis by describing a pattern of settlement location found in the Pre-Columbian Wari Empire of Peru.