This presentation was given at the 2018 SAA Conference in Washington DC. The preliminary results as discussed below are being developed into a forthcoming paper. Citation: Goodwin, Graham, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Kristy E. Primeau, and David E. Witt. 2018. Soundscapes and Visionscapes: Investigating Ancient Maya Cities with GIS and 3D Modeling. Paper presented at the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Washington, DC, April 12, 2018. Soundscapes and Visionscapes: Investigating Ancient Maya Cities with GIS and 3D Modeling [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; RichardsRissetto 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 information (Houston 1998; Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006), and our research begins to test this idea using GIS and VR to investigate sights and sounds at the ancient Maya city of Copan. [SLIDE 3] Today a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Honduras—Copan was from the 5th to 9th centuries the center of a kingdom that at its peak covered over 250 square kilometers. Located at the southeast periphery of the ancient Maya world it was an important cultural and commercial crossroad. [SLIDE 4] One of its most important Soundscapes and Visionscapes | 2 kings, ruler 13, who ruled the Copan kingdom from 695 CE until he was decapitated by a nearby vassal state in 738, is known for introducing high-relief stelae and sculpture to the city. One of his most dramatic changes was enclosing the city’s Great Plaza with bleachers and erecting seven stelae in this area. The scholar, Elizabeth Newsome (2001), has argued that he erected these stelae to create a ritual circuit that he traversed in public performances. One objective of our research is to investigate the potential role of sound and sight in Ruler 13’s stelae circuit. Who could see the performance as he walked from stelae to stelae? Who could hear it? Were they one and the same? What might the results tell us about Maya performance and targeted audience? [SLIDE 5] A second objective is to explore changes through time in Copan’s urban fabric. In addition to overhauling the Great Plaza, Ruler 13 also commissioned one of the city’s most impressive buildings—Temple 22. Situated in the East Court of the Acropolis, this temple was supposedly elevated to give it broad visibility, while making it simultaneously inaccessible. But what happens to the aura, atmosphere, and performance spaces of the Acropolis twenty-five years later when Ruler 16, Copan’s final dynastic king, commissions at least four new buildings in the Acropolis. How is the visibility and acoustics of ritual performance affected? [SLIDE 6] To explore these two scenarios, we employ a three-step approach. Step 1- Data Creation involving LiDAR, GIS, and 3D modeling to perform computational analysis on a simulated ancient landscape rather than the contemporary landscape. Step 2- Calculate visibility and Noise propagation using GIS and finally in Step 3 to allow a deeper engagement with Copan's past landscape, we are working to use the GIS- derived data to design a VR experience that combines sound and vision. [SLIDE 7] As we are all aware, the acquisition of large and comprehensive data sets using, for example, airborne LiDAR is changing our perceptions of ancient landscapes, and encouraging fresh lines of inquiry. While revealing archaeological sites beneath Central America’s dense canopy, airborne LiDAR provides terrain models of modern surfaces and captures extant features; that is, it captures modern landscapes. However to analyze sight and sound of the past we need to simulate the ancient landscape. [SLIDE 8] Here you see a photo of an archaeological mound from Copan. Most of the ancient buildings of Maya cities now look like this and with the LiDAR data this is what we have captured: the present. If we were to perform visibility and acoustic analyses with these 3D data, we would be using present-day mound height, not original building heights, and this is a problem! To examine visibility and sound in the past, we need to simulate the past landscape. This process involves various data sources and steps and is not the point of today’s talk, but for the GIS modeling one of the most important data sets we generate is an Urban Digital Elevation Model or Urban DEM. Soundscapes and Visionscapes | 3 [SLIDE 9] In this way we end up with a raster data representation of Copan that allows us to perform quantitative analysis for visibility and sound. Here you see a hillshade derived from the Urban DEM of of Copan’s main civic-ceremonial Group in the late eighth to early ninth centuries. [SLIDE 10] Now that we have this Urban DEM and other georeferenced data layers, we employ GIS to generate soundsheds and viewsheds. Many of us are familiar with GIS approaches to visibility so today we provide only a bit of background on acoustics. [SLIDE 11] Although the sounds produced and experienced by cultures have changed over time, we can reliably model the propagation of sound because it behaves according to known physical principles of waves and particle dispersion. [SLIDE 12] Given this precept, soundshed modeling was completed using a Soundshed Analysis Tool that requires nine input parameters written in the Python programming language for ArcGIS. This example shows the lines of script that are used to calculate the Fresnel number used in the barrier attenuation formula to measure the transmission of sound through and around barriers. If you want more information on this check out Primeau and Witt 2017 in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports. [SLIDE 13] Now that we have some basic background on acoustics and the GIS tool, we will show some of the results for our two case studies. In scenario I, we examine the acoustics of the Great Plaza stelae circuit using a person’s raised voice as the sound source. [SLIDE 14] We have modeled soundsheds for each of the seven stelae and the top of Structure 10L-4. This map shows in yellow the audibility of a speaker located at Stela C proposed to be the start of the stelae circuit. [SLIDE 15] In contrast, this map shows the full extent of the soundscape for the stelae circuit during Ruler 13’s reign. Listeners would need to be within the hatched area of the plaza to hear Ruler 13’s raised voice as he traversed from stela to stela; however, audibility at each vantage point changed as the speaker moved. [SLIDE 16] In scenario II, we create and compare soundsheds and viewsheds for two time periods—the reign of Ruler 13 and the reign of Ruler 16—in order to investigate the impact of a massive building campaign in this part of the city by Ruler 16. The case study is a proposed procession route moving counterclockwise (Baudez 1991; Reese-Taylor 2002; von Schwerin 2011), as is common among the ancient Maya, from the West Court to the East Court using a conch shell as the sound source. [SLIDE 17] Let’s first take a quick look at the differences between two procession points during Ruler 13’s reign. Here is the soundshed from point 11, the center spot in the plaza of the East Court. The map shows that sound propagates to the Southeast and Northwest from this location. [SLIDE 18] However, at the next point in the procession, point 12, which is positioned mid-way on the Jaguar stairway in the East Court, sound Soundscapes and Visionscapes | 4 propagates in different directions to the North and South; thus, potentially targeting different audiences. [SLIDE 19] Moving on to show the full extent of the soundscape for the acropolis procession during Ruler 13’s reign, we know that the conch shell trumpet wouldn’t have been heard in all locations throughout the procession, however, listeners within the hatched area were able to hear the procession at some point as it advanced. These results indicate that anyone in the Great Plaza, the elite suburb of El Bosque to the west, the elite complex to the north as well as hilltop areas to the Southeast would have been “part” of this experience. However, interestingly those in the Eastern part of the city would have been “excluded”. [SLIDE 20] Here we now see the soundscape created by a conch shell being played from the exact same procession points during Ruler 16’s reign. [SLIDE 21] If we quickly compare the differences between the soundsheds of Ruler 13 and 16. One of the most interesting differences in the audibility of the acropolis procession is the soundshed at the final location in the procession. Here there has been a noticeable reduction in the audible area from ruler 13’s time indicated by the red outline to the audible areas for ruler 16 indicated in yellow. If we calculate area for the two soundsheds at Point 13. The results indicate that the soundshed for Ruler 13 is approximately 209,655 square meters, whereas the soundshed for Ruler 16 is reduced to by 25% to 157,709 square meters. [SLIDE 22] To bring vision into the picture, during Ruler 13’s reign people standing in any area indicated by a blue polygon could see the procession atop the Jaguar dance platform, and those within the red outline could hear the procession. Although people located in areas with a red outline and blue polygon could both see and hear the procession, it is interesting to note that nearer to the platform many could hear but not see the procession, as indicated by yellow polygons outlined in red. [SLIDE 23] In contrast, during Ruler 16’s reign both visibility and audibility of the Acropolis procession was reduced. [SLIDE 24] While we haven’t had much time to delve into all the resultant data, initial interpretations highlight some interesting findings. For example, while the stelae circuit is located in the highly accessible Great Plaza at the intersection of two causeways (sacbe) and held “seats” for several thousand people, the performances held in this space would have been less visible than those held in the elevated, but highly restricted Acropolis. Perhaps reflecting the Maya notion that to “see” or “overlook” was associated not only with higher status, but also to enforce the notion that to be allseeing was to be all-knowing (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006). So while only some select elite were allowed to actually participate in the Acropolis processions, a much Soundscapes and Visionscapes | 5 larger group of people were allowed to view and hear “snapshots” of the event—making them “part” of performance and yet not fully. A second interesting result is the shifting pattern from Ruler 13 to Ruler 16. We’ve seen that the elite complex at El Bosque was included in the Acropolis circuit’s soundshed during R13’s reign, but that subsequent modifications precluded the people living in this area from hearing as much of the circuit as they did previously. While we don’t argue that this was done intentionally—this change may have merely been the side-effect of construction– it does illustrate that the observation of the Acropolis circuit was not foremost in the mind of R16 as he modified the architecture of the Acropolis. So we continue to explore these GIS data but at the same time we are [SLIDE 25] moving from this computational realm to the experiential realm and to do this we make use of virtual reality. Our main objective is to use VR to integrate sights and sounds because knowledge of the world, that is, our experiences, are enhanced by interactions of the visual and auditory systems. Currently, we are using the gaming engine Unity, the Oculus Rift headset, and DearVR (a unity plugin that simulates spatial sound) for this research. [SLIDE 26] For this part of the talk, we’ll show you a couple videos of the VR environment. The first shows a walkthrough of the procession route from scenario 2 placing a conch shell trumpet sound source at point 13 during Ruler 16’s reign. [SLIDE 27 - video of procession route] [SLIDE 28] Ancient Maya paintings like the Bonampak's murals depict trumpeters, drummers, and other musicians taking part in processions. Other Archaeological evidence of sound exists in the form of musical instruments such as shell trumpets, ceramic whistles, and wooden drum (Katz 2017; Zender 2010) and finally hieroglyphs give indication of the roles of sound (Houston, Stuart, and Taube 2006). We hope that our research can add to this body of evidence by developing computational and experiential approaches to investigate the roles of vision and sound in differentially shaping the experiences of ancient Maya people. [SLIDE 29] Our research is in the early stages, and the future directions of research are: (1) Additional development of the GIS model to include ecosystem factors and impact variables of construction materials for acoustics; (2) Develop a workflow for bringing quantitative acoustic data from GIS into VR— along these lines we have collected acoustical data from the field at Copan; and (3) Perhaps most importantly, bringing people into it all--- we have begun modeling the impact of audience size on the acoustics using 3D modeling software; however, we will continue this research and work to integrate it with the GIS modeling as well as the VR. Thank you. Soundscapes and Visionscapes | 6 Works Cited Baudez, CF. 1991. The Cross Pattern at Copan: Forms, Rituals, and Meanings. In Sixth Palenque Round Table, 1986. Eds. W. Hanks and D. Rice, pp. 81-88. Salt Lake City: University of Utah. Doyle, J., T. Garrison, and S. Houston. 2012. 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