Dwelling at Cruz Vinto: Time and space in a Late Regional Developments Period (1200 - 1450 DC) fortress of north Lípez (Potosí, Bolivia)

Abstract

Landscape, as a system of reference that orientates social practices is embedded with different temporalities. Maybe the most important is its relation to the past, because it is through habitus as incorporation of past experiences and representations that it settles the basis for future actions and representations. In this paper we propose through the relationship between architecture, circulation and space syntax that space in Cruz Vinto, a pukara from Late Regional Development Period or Late Intermediate Period (1200-1450 DC) in Northern Lípez (Potosí, Bolivia), was structuring a way of dwelling oriented to the past. Different materiality in the settlement would have been operating in redundant way to incorporate and objectify social practices that had the ancestors as focal figures. These relationships between social agents and the spatiality of practices would have created and linked different temporalities, relating daily and biographical time with mythic time and order represented by the ancestors. This process resulted in the invention and objectification of a tradition that built, and was built recursively by social collectives with a corporate orientation.