Carlos Espinosa, USFQ

Data Access on Nakala: http://doi.org/10.34847/nkl.f6323el0

 

Abstract

Archival City Quito-USFQ encompasses three pillars: the digitalization of urban archives, GIS mapping of the uses of urban space and Unity based 3D modelling of historical cityscapes.  All three of these features place the project squarely in the field of the digital humanities, which lies at the intersection of digital technologies and the humanities, including history (Gardiner and Musto, 2015).  This data paper focuses on the third pillar, the 3 D construction of Quito in the Inca era, entitled Quito 1532. Technologically, the 3 D model combines NASA relief maps, Google Earth, aerial drone-based photography, the Unity 3D gaming engine, Maya graphics and Render-Blender architectural apps. The panoramic environment generated is interactive, permitting an exploratory tour of Quito on the eve of the Spanish conquest.

Keywords: Ecuador, Quito, Inca era,  archives, archeology, 3D modelling

Introduction

Under the aegis of Archival City, Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), a private, secular university in Quito, Ecuador, launched the digital humanities-urban history project Archival City Quito-USFQ in 2021. Archival City Quito-USFQ encompasses three pillars: the digitalization of urban archives, GIS mapping of the uses of urban space and Unity based 3D modeling of historical cityscapes[1].  All three of these features place the project squarely in the field of the digital humanities, which lies at the intersection of digital technologies and the humanities, including history (Gardiner and Musto, 2015).  However, the project may also be seen as being anchored in urban history, as it employs the digital humanities to enrich our understanding of urban pasts (Ewen, 2016).

The Archival City Quito-USFQ project is mainly focused on Incaic and colonial Quito (1500-1800).  Nevertheless, consistent with the objectives of Archival City, its purpose is to contribute to a better urban future founded on harnessing the city´s rich tangible and intangible historic patrimony.  Thus, the products of Archival City Quito-USFQ, such as digitalized archives, historical maps and 3D reconstructions, are intended for use not only by historians, but also by contemporary urban planners, the heritage industry and tourism, as well as by activists and citizens.

In line with the broad objectives of Archival City, the urban history dimension of the Archival City Quito-USFQ project seeks to address, the intersection between the usages of archives, digital technologies, and the historical trajectory of the city of Quito.  The broad problematic that guides the group´s deployment of visualization tools comprises two questions.  How can archival data regarding urban history be visualized through 3D reconstructions and how does this modelling enrich specialist knowledge of the past and democratize that knowledge?

Our interdisciplinary team includes two historians, myself and Emiliano Gil, a historical archeologist, Fernando Astudillo, a pre-Columbian archeologist, David Brown, and a digital programmer, Nicolás Castillo.  The ethnohistorian Tamara Estupiñan participated in the early stages of the project.  In addition, we have established an alliance with the Museo de Arte Precolombino Casa del Alabado, one of Quito´s leading archeological-art history museums.

This data paper presents the 3 D construction project of Quito in the Inca era, entitled Quito 1532. It focuses on the digital humanities methodology of the Archival City Quito-USFQ project and its institutional framework, rather than on an analysis of the research findings relating to its urban history, which will be presented subsequently in indexed publications. Some data produced in the framework of this 3D modeling (maps, written texts for audio recordings, geolocation reference table) is stored in the Archival City Quito collection on the HumaNum open data platform Nakala. The following alphanumeric code has been chosen for this data set: ACQ04_CE where ACQ stands for Archival City Quito; 04 refers to the fourth dataset produced by the AC-Quito research teams and CE refers to the author Carlos Espinosa. The content of this data set is detailed in the finding aid ACQ04_FA_CE on Nakala.

It is first necessary to provide information on the urban contours of Inca and colonial Quito.  Today, Quito is a densely inhabited, built-up space with longstanding institutions of municipal governance.  Quito has been in existence continuously since at least 1500, in terms of its historic nucleus, and over two millennia, if we take into account the Andean plateau in which it is set (Jara, and Santa Maria, 2009, vol. 1) The city is located in a relatively high Andean plateau (2,850 meters), at the base of an active volcano known as Pichincha, and has a long history of recurring earthquakes.  Just before the Spanish conquest (1532-1534), Quito was a distant yet strategic outpost of the Inca empire which dominated several autochthonous settlements that had arisen previously around a complex of shallow lakes (Pino, 2002: Salomon, 1980; Burgos, 1995; Espinosa Soriano, 1988).

In the colonial era, Quito was a grid-patterned, baroque city (Cardinal-Pett, 2016; Schottelius, 1941) with a multiracial demography and hybrid features, such as indigenous neighborhoods with vernacular domestic architecture. Governed by a patrician town council known as the cabildo and part of the global Spanish empire (Ponce Leiva, 1998; Michom, 2007; Espinosa, 2010), colonial Quito served as a local and regional administrative center as well as a regional market place and stage for liturgical rituals (San Francisco, Un convento, 2011; Espinosa, 2015; Espinosa, 2012). Its elite and its population as a whole relied on the proceeds of regional textile production exported to, among other destinations, the famed mining center of Potosí (today in Bolivia) (Phelan, 1995) as well as on internally oriented commercial agriculture.

Figure 1- Map of the City of Quito in 1734 by Dionisio de Alcedo y Herrera

3D virtual models : Time Machine Europe

The generation of 3D virtual models of Quito of stratified historical moments, pursued by Archival City Quito-USFQ,  is quite similar to Time Machine Europe designs in its use of digitalized archival data as sources, and video game or virtual reality visualization technology.  Financed by a European Commission grant, the Time Machine Europe project seeks to ¨join Europe’s rich past with up-to-date digital technologies and infrastructures, creating a collective digital information system that maps European economic, social, cultural and geographical evolution across times¨. The European Time Machine encompasses dozens of Local Time Machine Projects distributed throughout the continent.

Overall, these projects appear to be in their initial states and the ambitious promise that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could be developed to recognize the characters of paleographic manuscripts, and so obviate the need for transcription into modern script, has still not materialized.  The Venice Time Machine, seen by many as a model, has stalled, reportedly over disputes between the Venetian archive authorities and the Swiss based experts in digital technologies and infrastructures.

Nevertheless, the outline of Time Machine Europe´s methodology may be inferred from operative local Time Machines in the European context.  Antwerp´s Time Machine seeks to join the mass digitalization of archival sources, historical big data, with virtual reality, in order to research and visualize Antwerp´s early modern past.  ¨GISorical Antwerp¨ is developing ¨social maps¨, including the mapping of households corresponding to stratified moments in the city´s history.  One of the overarching concerns of these social maps are the inequalities that have accompanied historical urbanization and presumably colonial trade. These maps visualize information generated by digitalized archival data by locating it in georeferenced space.

The project also employs immersive virtual reality technology to build a ¨historically correct 3D reconstruction of a seventeenth century fort¨. Amsterdam´s Time Machine, in turn, focuses on the city´s management of its water system over time, combining GIS maps with 3D reconstruction to visualize the relationship between urban space and water levels.  These experiments are significant due to their focus on substantive urban historical issues, such as inequalities and water management, the use of digitalized archival sources and visualization technologies, such as 3D reconstruction and virtual reality.  This methodology should not be limited to European contexts.

As may be judged from the literature on Time Machine Europe, the only official local Time Machine projects located outside of Europe are to be found in Turkey (Turkiye). Although the global project Archival City is affiliated with Time Machine Europe, only the site of Bologna is listed as an official local Time Machine project. The Archival City Quito-USFQ project thus finds itself in a somewhat anomalous position, operating with a Time Machine methodology, but not officially a local Time Machine Europe project.  However, it is not far behind local European Time Machines in terms of its implementation, its use of digital technologies or its scale, as it combines digitalized archival data with the broad visualization of cityscapes and landscapes.

Digitalized archival sources

The archival information for the 3D modelling in the Archival City Quito-USFQ project is extracted from digitalized archival data sources.  The main source is the multi-volume collection of the transcribed colonial era town council acts or Libros de Cabildo (1534-1600), recently uploaded by Quito´s Municipal Archive. In addition, relevant documentation of the Archivo Gangotena-Jijón archive, will also be employed.

The advantage of deploying digitalized data bases to plot points within and visualize the cityscape and natural landmarks of Quito over its history is that algorithm-based word searches greatly accelerate research, permitting the instantaneous retrieval of information.  Transcription into print is imperative for the use of algorithms, as no electronic format is yet capable of algorithm-based searches with colonial era paleography.  The digitalized Libros de Cabildo or town council acts are uniquely valuable for creating the 3D replica of Inca Quito, as they not only recorded the Spanish conquistadores’ engagement with what remained of the Inca urban complex, they also mapped the terrain in order to reshape it and appropriate its land and mineral resources (fig. 2).  The use of these colonial sources, however, requires careful philology of sixteenth century geographic terminology, including terms for directions, natural landmarks and types of built-up space.  Determining the meanings of geographical terms is a challenge that we have addressed by comparing usages between different types of sources, such as the chronicles of Conquest, early modern thesauruses and the early municipal acts of Quito and other colonial cities of the early modern Spanish empire.

Figure 2-Frontispiece from the Libros de Cabildo

Based on digitalized archival data, we have virtually modelled broad swaths of the landscape-cityscapes of sixteenth century Quito.  This project is in many ways pioneering in the Latin American context.  3D reconstructions have been attempted for the Mexica or Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (fig.3). However, the latter are not inscribed in a stratigraphic project that encompasses archival digitalization and multiple historical moments.  However, unlike our 3D replicas, they are not interactive and do not contain explanatory audios which reference equivocal archival or archeological data.

Figure 3- 3D Tenochtitlan Model

An interactive 3D modelling

The costumed simulated geospatial and interactive 3D environment entitled Quito 1532, referring to Pre-Hispanic Quito on the eve of the Spanish Conquest, is now basically complete. Technologically, the 3 D model combines NASA relief maps, Google Earth, aerial drone-based photography, the Unity 3D gaming engine, Maya graphics and Render-Blender architectural apps.  The panoramic environment generated is decidedly interactive, permitting an exploratory tour of Quito on the eve of the Spanish conquest, in which the user decides his or her itinerary. The user may select his-her itinerary within the 3D environment by mobilizing via basic controls an Andean condor for aerial views, and an Incaic chasqui or Inca messenger across the screen surface.

The goal of the exercise for the non-specialized public is to experience a given historical moment and obtain a sense of place within a past cityscape and landscape.  In the case of Ecuadorians, they will obtain, we argue, a sense of belonging reinforced by the model.  However, there is also critical edge to the ¨game¨, since, by emphasizing the native stratum in a long term digital archeological recreation of the city, the model challenges the hegemonic view of Quito as a Spanish city, founded by the conquistadores in 1534 and granted the status of ¨ciudad¨ by Hapsburg emperor Charles V in the 1550s. For archeologists and historians, the benefits of Quito 1532 is that it provides the possibility of envisioning the occupation of space, its uses and built up areas in terms of their full materiality and spatiality.

The Quito 1532 project has recently incorporated a scavenger hunt game dimension, such as that featured in 3D reconstructions in the heritage industry in Anglo-Saxon countries.  In scavenger hunt games, the players traverse the 3D environment in search of a valuable object (Nevola et. Al., 2022; Kee, 2019). They do so in response to a prompt, a mission that is historically credible and endowed with historical verisimilitude.  Our scavenger hunt component is being developed in partnership with the Museo de Arte Precolombino Casa del Alabado, whose director Lucia Durán is actively collaborating with our project.  Public history expert Mireya Salgado (Flacso-Ecuador) is also assisting in this upgrade of Quito 1532.

The scavenger hunt in the video game Quito 1532 consists of two missions or searches of significant objects that will, according to the prompt provided by the game, assist the Incas and their local supporters to counter the Spanish conquest.  The user is asked to assume the identity of an avatar, an Inca messenger that can metamorphize into a condor, called Antarki in Inca mythology (fig 4 & 5). As Antarki, the user traverses the virtual environment in search of Incaic drinking cups or keros, which will enable the Inca authorities to renew their alliance with local authorities in a wartime context; or in search of weapons, star shaped stone mallets that are crucial to confront Spanish forces.  Designed for younger users of ages 10-18, the scavenger game draws its users into the virtual environment and provides information about key historical-archeological objects and their usages.  It is also a lesson in decolonial history, as the user is asked to identify with a native subject, instead of role playing the European conqueror.

The significant objects are themselves 3D replicas of pieces in the extraordinary collection of the Museo de Arte Precolombino Casa del Alabado.  They were chosen and scanned jointly by our team and the museum staff, including Lucia Duran and Carlos Montalvo, and then inserted into the virtual environment of the game.  When the user ultimately finds the significant object a textual explanation of the object appears[2].  Thus, the user visualizes the museum´s patrimonial possessions in their original geographic and archeological settings.

Figures 4 & 5 -Takes of the Condor y Chasqui in the 3 D model

A more detailed explanation of how the virtual environment was constructed will illustrate the interaction of digital technologies and digitalized archival sources.  A NASA Earth Image relief map functions as the baseline for the virtual environment (fig.6).  Unlike Google Maps, it does not show the modern built-up environment.  Often seen as the core of urban landscape visualization, Google Maps does not enable the user to vacate modern built-up space, and its historical archive only goes back to 1984. By using the lower resolution NASA map, we constructed a broad landscape emptied of modern built-up space, but displaying key natural features. On the landscape based on the NASA map, we could then add natural features that have disappeared over the course of the last five hundred years.  Thus, we added three lakes and several ravines that have been filled up over time (fig.8).

We also etched in nearly fifty reconstructed cultural landmarks, such as Inca fortresses, administrative compounds, royal retreats, waystations, Inca roads, as well as autochthonous settlements (large villages) and ceremonial sites. For some buildings, it was possible to overlay our reconstruction of cultural landmarks on drone-based photography of archeological sites, employing a technique known as augmented reality or AR (Kari Kraus et al, 2019).  This was especially effective for the Inca fortifications that surrounded Quito, among the most extensive in the Inca empire (Kaufmann and Kaufmann, 2006).  Thankfully, the project has been able to draw on drone-based 3 D photographs provided by one of the members of the team.  In other instances, in which archeological remains are now absent, erased by colonization or rampant urbanization, it was necessary to imagine how the site may have looked in 1532 based on references in the documentary sources and-or standardized Inca architectural formats.  The municipal acts of the early Spanish city mentioned above, were a key source for Inca buildings that disappeared rapidly after colonization.

Figure 6- NASA Earth Image of the Highlands of Quito

The landscape features prominently in the 3D model Quito 1532 and is much more than a setting for an urban core.  The landscape of the plateau around the more densely occupied core of Quito was rather an integral part of it.  Instead of a city set apart from its natural surroundings, town versus country, as in the European classical and medieval geographic imaginary, we are dealing with an Andean pattern of built-up space fully immersed in the landscape.  In other words, a complex of dispersed, but interlinked imperial administrative, palatine, religious and military edifications, and irrigated fields (Almeida, 1994) interspersed by local villages and ceremonial centers inserted into the natural landscape.

Indeed, we are reconstructing a pre-Hispanic, Andean ontology in which human communities, built-up spaces and sentient natural landmarks form part of an assemblage of agents endowed with volition and emotions (fig.7). The tutelary volcano overshadowing the plateau, for example, was conceived as a waka or sacred landmark which regulated the flow of water and rainfall and showed its potency through periodic eruptions (Bray, 2015). This is aligned with the immanentist New Materialism paradigm in archeology and anthropology, i.e., the ontological turn (Pauketat, 2020). One of the major challenges of the 3D model is precisely to transcend the Western geographic notions of space as contentless extension and the nature-culture opposition by etching a vital, animistic landscape that interacts with human communities.

Figure 7-Inca Speaking to Mountain Peak Wakas, from Martin de Murúa in la Historia General del Perú… 1613.

Figure 8, the now vanished Iñaquito Lake in the 3D Model.

For each cultural and natural landmark, a verbal narrative recorded on MP3 is included, which explains the archival sources that we used to identify it, its location and function[3].  If information for the site is sparse or controversial, we refer to the gaps in evidence and the academic debate.  For example, the audio tracks discuss whether the Inca roads near Quito were paved with stone and had retaining walls or were dirt paths (Hyslop, 1984). This explicit uncertainty is crucial, as it overcomes the fallacy of 3 D models as a direct mimesis of the past, by owning up to the many gaps in the evidence.

The Inca Houses of Pleasure in 3 D

An example of the process of selecting, geolocating and reconstructing entities in the 3D environment will be useful for better understanding the project methodology. The long since dismantled ¨houses of pleasure¨ of Huayna Capac was an Inca compound on the ridge of the Pichincha peak in what has historically been the urban core of Quito.

Figure 9- Map of Quito. 1573[4].

They are mentioned several times in the early sixteenth century acts of the town council as the ¨Houses of Pleasure¨ of the Inca emperor Huayna Capac. At least according to this source, the ¨Houses of Pleasure¨ were the largest and most significant Inca buildings the Spaniards had to cope with in the urban core of Quito.  In modern Ecuadorian historiography, the ¨Houses of Pleasure¨ are placed squarely on the ridge, where in the nineteenth century there was an elite neighborhood known as El Placer.  However, a closer reading of the relevant passages of the Libros de Cabildo, indicates that it was an extensive compound that stretched across the ridge toward the valley floor.

Very likely, given Inca architectural paradigms, the houses in plural were enclosed by rectangular stone or adobe walls, an enclosure known in Quechua as a cancha.  We can more or less pinpoint and geo-reference their location in the 3D environment not only because of the existence of precise documentary references, but also as a result of archeological evidence, showing Inca remains under the Juan Montalvo school located where the Libros de Cabildo indicated the existence of the ¨Houses of Pleasure¨ (Jara y Santamaría, 2009, vol.  1).

The meaning of the Spanish term ¨Houses of Pleasure¨ and its implications for the function of the site are controversial.  Some historians believe ¨Houses of Pleasure¨ refers to an acllawasi, an enclosed space for women who ritually prepared food and clothing for the Inca emperor, which the Spaniards often likened to an Ottoman harem oriented toward sexual pleasure.   However, the Spanish chroniclers also use the term to refer to Inca retreats, which were vast royal compounds employed as country houses.  There are good arguments for both attributions or for a combination of both functions.  The Spanish chronicles of Peru highlight the presence of hundreds of acllas, women enclosed in an acllahuasi, in Quito at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival.

At the same time, the location of the ¨Houses of Pleasure´s¨ on a forested ridge with flows of water was an apt environment for a royal retreat.  As the term house of pleasure appears more frequently in the Spanish chronicles of Peru as a reference to Inca royal retreats, a kind of locus amoenus, we have chosen this attribution.   As a high-status site, it would have been an Inca walled compound or cancha with several large houses.  We have thus extrapolated from the standard high-status compound format to etch in the ¨Houses of Pleasure¨ in the 3D model as a large Inca walled compound with several houses made of stone.  This compound would have been traversed by a ravine, water channels and stood at the foot of a snowcapped mountain.

Fig.  10- Vistas of the Houses of Pleasure in the 3D model

The GPS mapping pillar is largely the responsibility of our historical archeologist Fernando Astudillo (fig. 11).  Suffice to say that the project overlaid an eighteenth-century map generated by the Enlightenment era Franco-Spanish geodesic expedition over Google Maps.  This allows for georeferencing[5]. Subsequently, numerous points drawn from archival sources have been plotted on the map of the city.  For example, artisanal workshops, such as butcher’s stores, tile workshops, and textile workshops are identified on the map, as are the houses of indigenous people. This enables identifying the uses of space, including patterns of ethnic segregation and economic zoning.

Figure 11- Eighteenth Century Map of Quito overlaid on Google Maps.

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, Archival City-Quito-USFQ is a digital humanities-urban history project focused on the historical trajectory or biography of Quito, Ecuador from 1500-1800. The use of digitalized archives provides the visualization components of the project by making available data that is indispensable to imagine past cityscapes and landscapes.  The development of the 3D model is inspired by the European Time Machine project and seeks to generate stratified models of the history of the city through the use of NASA Earth Images and Google Maps, aerial drone photography, video game engines, such as Unity and architectural software such as Blender.

The introduction of ceramic and stone museum pieces offers, in turn, the exciting possibility of envisioning artefacts in their original geographic and archeological settings.  The overall purpose of the project is to deepen and renew our knowledge of the urban histories of Quito, and to disseminate that knowledge to urban heritage specialists, city planners, activists and citizens. Moreover, it may be considered as a model for visual reconstructions of the trajectory of other cities in Latin America, especially those with pre-Columbian and colonial origins.

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[1] At present, Archival City -USFQ is engaged in a 3D replica of colonial Quito, entitled Quito and the Franciscan Strategy of Conversion, which visualizes the sites of early Franciscan conversion efforts (1545-1560). The latter 3D model will envision an urban axis that encompassed the Mercedarian convent and the Franciscan convent, the earliest Christian nerve centers that shaped the colonial city (Proaño, 1993; Moreno, 1998) as well as the southern outskirts of Quito, where the indigenous population was concentrated in early colonial Quito for purposes of administration and Christian conversion.

[2] For a list and and a short explanation of the objects selected for the scavenger hunt among the collections of the Casa del Alabado see ACQ04_objmus_01_CE on Nakala.

[3] The texts used for the oral presentation of the different historical sites in the video game are collected in the PDF document ACQ04_textsaudio_01_CE.

[4] Other maps used for the  3D modelling have been deposited on Nakala under the code ACQ04_maps_CE.

[5] See the table of geolocation ACQ04_GeoRef_01_CE on  Nakala.

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