Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society 81 (2010) A Site-Planning Analysis of Historic Downtown Austin, Texas Brett A. Houk ABSTRACT Archeologists and cultural geographers have long recognized that cultures around the world manipulate architecture and landscapes to convey meaning. Archeologists working among complex societies refer to the practice of symbolically structuring the built environment as site planning. Rulers would use site planning for two common purposes: first, to symbolically recreate or express a cultural worldview by creating a microcosm of the universe or cosmos, and, second, to politically link a site or building to a powerful peer through architectural emulation. In addition to conveying symbolic information through architecture, site planning can also include the manipulation of time to relate events in the present to important dates in the past. I examine the historic plan of downtown Austin, Texas, from a site-planning perspective. The leaders of Texas created a microcosm of the republic in the design of Austin in the late 1830s and decades later completed the plan with the construction of the state capitol building. The Texas Capitol is an early example of a site-planning template, a set of principles, for building state houses in the United States. By manipulating events in time and expressing ideology through architecture, the architects and builders of Austin and the Capitol not only linked Texas to the political sphere of the U.S. Capitol, but also expressed the ideology of democracy in a distinctively Texan way, one that harkened back to the founding of Texas as a nation. INTRODUCTION The symbolic manipulation of space through architecture has been documented for a variety of archeological and anthropological cultures (e.g., Ashmore and Sabloff 2002; Aveni and Hartung 1986; Blier 1987; Kuper 1972; Mathews and Gar- ber 2004; Tate 1992; Tuan 1974), and the study of the meaning of the built environment and the way in which the landscape functions as text that communicates specific cultural information has fascinated cultural geographers for some time (e.g., Duncan 1990; Rapoport 1982; Tuan 1974; Wheat- ley 1967). Burials (Becker 1988; Blier 1987; Coe 1988; Hall 1989), caches (Chase and Chase 1998; Hammond 1987), and households (Blier 1987; Donley 1982; Nabakov and Easton 1989) have been shown to be symbolically structured and, in some cases, have been interpreted as microcosms, “providing ever-present spatial charts of the emic structure of social and ideological relationships” (Ashmore 1991:199) through the physical pattern- ing of activities and artifacts. At a much larger lev- el, entire sites and landscapes have been analyzed as symbolically ordered microcosms (Ashmore 1991; Benson 1981; de Montmollin 1988, 1989; Duncan 1990; Hyslop 1990; Kowalski 1994, 1996; Reilly 1994; Sugiyama 1993; Tate 1992; Tourtellot et al. 2003; Tuan 1974). In most archeological cases, studying the meaning of the built environment is difficult at best because the cultures in question, even if they had written language, most likely did not record information about how or why they built particular sites the way they did. Furthermore, archeologi- cal sites, particularly cities and towns of complex societies, are frequently accretionary, expanding through time both vertically and horizontally. What may have been a coherent and meaningful plan at one point in time may be completely distorted and obscured by subsequent expansion, renovation, and remodeling. The longer and more complicated the political and architectural history of a site, the more difficult it is to discern individual planning agendas (Ashmore and Sabloff 2002). Despite these limitations, site-planning ap- proaches, defined below, have the potential to reveal new and useful information about how the