This paper develops a quantitative framework to compare settlement patterns resulting from ethno-historical versus archaeological evidence. Our case study is the landscape of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense (modern-day Colombia), which was inhabited by Muisca Indigenous people between 600 and 1600 CE. We developed an inhomogeneous point process model based on archaeological survey data and environmental covariates to simulate plausible extrapolated settlement distributions for the entire Muisca territory during the Late period of the pre-Columbian habitation. These simulations, accounting for first- and second-order effects, constitute predictions of settlement across the landscape. To investigate emergent hierarchies among the simulated sites, we use a spatial interaction model to explore how hypothetical interactions between sites might produce central places based on minimal assumptions. Then, a sensitivity analysis revealed that specific parameter combinations yield stable spatial structures with strong predictive capacity, which were compared against two Early Colonial ethnohistorical datasets. We explore the varying degrees of correspondence between the ethnohistorical record and extrapolations of the archaeological evidence at three comparative levels of increasing scale: all ethnohistorically-reported central settlements, all settlements further distinguished in the sources, and the three reported sub-regions of Muisca territory. At smaller scales, the model results fit general landscape patterns exhibited by the ethnohistorical evidence but do not match specific sites particularly well, while at larger scales, the model offers a very good sense of the major divisions described by the Early Spanish colonizers.