Architecture and landscape: Shaping the pre-Hispanic world

This article poses an interdisciplinary research project to explore the pre-Hispanic architectonic representations and their potential referents in the architectonic monuments from the ancient Peru. In this context, the findings discovered by the San Jose de Moro Architectonic Project have enabled the correlation of a set of architectonical representations associated to elite tombs of the late Moche with specified edifications present in archeological sites in the valley of Jequetepeque. In this concern, a series of hypotheses have been proposed assuming the possible association of these architectonical representations with the architectonic spaces these characters themselves owned while living, as if they had been meant to be symbolically attributed with their natural spaces of activity, where they exerted their power and authority. The project has developed an analytical recognition of this type of architecture by studying its formal and structural characteristics, its setting and integration with the landscape to elaborate, based on the aforesaid, reconstructive proposals. Thus, the old canons portrayed in the pre-Hispanic architectonic representations retrieve their possible architectonic referents along with their specific components and in their original representation contexts as for actual buildings whose architecture is imprinted in a singular urban fabric and the texture of a specific territorial landscape.