Prehistoric Panopticon: Settlement Visibility at Ancient Cahokia Mounds

Abstract

Throughout time, cultures have manipulated the landscape for a variety of reasons, including the promotion of social control. One approach to facilitating this control is through omnipresent surveillance, known as a Panopticon design. Though the Panopticon is more commonly associated with structural design in industrial societies, the large earthen mounds constructed by prehistoric civilizations could have also played a role in maintaining social order. To explore the applicability of the Panopticon concept in a prehistoric context, visibility of the largest manmade earthen mound in the New World, Monks Mound, was modeled in a geographic information system. Results indicate that the terraces on the mound and the powerful individuals residing there would have been visible to most of the population, even when accounting for subsequent landscape modifications. This level of visibility would have projected an omnipresent threat of surveillance, possibly facilitating social order and cohesion among such a large population.

Hillforts and Power in the British Post-Roman West: A GIS Analysis of Dinas Powys

“…Foucault (1977: 195-230), for instance, argued that power over individuals could be achieved through the creation of panoptic surveillance mechanisms. Such ideas of surveillance existed in the nineteenth century, as extolled in Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, a prison designed to 'induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power' (Foucault, 1977: 201; for archaeological applications of these ideas, see Carlson & Jordan, 2014;Pierce & Matisziw, 2018). We do not contend that landscapes could be organized in such a way that they operated precisely like a panopticon but assert that visual domination can operate as a method of social control (Giddens, 1985: 14-15).…”

Colonial Logic Made Visible: Considering Seasonal Plantation Visibility in 3D ‘Fertile’ Digital Landscapes to Re- Examine Caribbean Panoptic Plantationscapes

“…Observer points were placed outside doorways, illustrated within the series of maps from the Codrington Papers. After identifying these observer points, visibility was calculated using a consistent set of parameters following methodologies demonstrated by Pierce and Matisziw (2021).These parameters included: estimated target height (surface offset) = 1 m (3.3 feet-around waist level), and observer height (observer offset) = 1.68 m (5.5 foot-approximately eye level) (Pierce and Matisziw, 2021).…”