Steven Wernke

Steven Wernke

Research

I am an archaeologist and historical anthropologist of Andean South America, with research interests centering on issues related to community, empire, colonialism, landscape, and culture change. Much of my work investigates the transformation of Andean communities and landscapes through Inka and Spanish imperial occupations. To pursue multidimensional views into these complex and often fraught processes, I combine archaeological, documentary, and ethnographic datasets within unifying spatial frameworks. My research takes place across the scalar spectrum, from the proxemics and affordances of the built environment to continental-scale patterns of settlement and land-use.

One arm of my research focuses on one of the largest forced resettlement programs in world history: the Reducción General de Indios (General Resettlement of Indians) of the 1570s, when the Spanish Viceroy Francisco de Toledo enacted the forced displacement of some 1.4 million native Andeans from their ancestral places of residence into over a thousand planned colonial towns around the viceroyalty of Peru. I am pursuing both local and global perspectives on the implementation and effects of the Reducción. Locally, I have worked with communities in the Colca Valley of southern highland Peru for three decades. Most recently, I have been engaged in a long-term, community-oriented “archaeological microhistory” project investigating the experience of serial forced resettlement through the colonial and republican eras in the community of Santa Cruz de Tuti, located in the upper reaches of the Colca Valley.

Another arm of my research develops large-scale archaeological and ethnohistorical projects. These projects are built on collaborative online platforms for generating and collating archaeological and historical data. Together with Akira Saito (National Museum of Ethnology, Japan) and Parker VanValkenburgh (Brown University), we have developed two web platforms: the Linked Open Gazetteer for the Andean Region (LOGAR) and the Geospatial Platform for Andean Culture, History, and Archaeology (GeoPACHA). LOGAR is an online gazetteer that enables collation of archival and ethnographic information by place (whether or not located in geographic space). GeoPACHA is a browser-based GIS that integrates historical aerial imagery and high resolution satellite imagery to enable virtual archaeological survey over very large areas. In our ongoing research, our teams have also developed and deployed Vision Transformer (ViT) AI models for continental-scale archaeological satellite imagery survey. With collaborating teams of archaeologists from South America, we are now auditing and refining these models through the current version of the platform: GeoPACHA-AI.

Funding

These projects have been made possible with the support of grants from the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, The American Council of Learned Societies, The Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies, The Vanderbilt Data Science Institute, the Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities, the Vanderbilt Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies, the National Museum of Ethnology (Japan), and a Vanderbilt Chancellor’s Faculty Fellowship.

SARL and VISR

My research is collaborative and often computationally demanding, and my lab, SARL (Spatial Analysis Research Laboratory) has been the home for much of it. Building on the diverse geospatial experience I acquired in my work in SARL, I established and direct VISR (Vanderbilt Institute for Spatial Research, a geospatial consultancy with a diverse portfolio of geospatial analytical projects in several fields, including epidemiology, public health, archaeology, engineering, and education, among others.