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Maritime culture existed parallel to the agrarian mainstream. The term cultural landscape is partly applied into archaeological thinking. The first application of the specific concept of a maritime cultural landscape (also known as seascape, waterscape, island archeology etc.) dates to the middle of the 1970s. Any holistic view of maritime culture must be conceptual, administrative, material, or instinctive. Maritime cultural landscape is multilayered, not isolated from inland landscape, and was first published in English at the University of Copenhagen. It includes any hermeneutic kind of human relationship to the sea. The concept of Maritime cultural landscape has been used universally. There are many efforts currently made across the globe to make the maritime cultural landscape concept meaningful and enrich the appreciation of the maritime heritage.

Ritual landscapes at sea are marked in the cognitive world of coastal people by a primary antagonism between sea and land. This contrast is negotiated by liminal 'foreign' agents, selected for their symbolic adherence to either part. The primary source of maritime culture is fishing as a survival of past hunter-gatherer societies. Forms of religious or magical management of this contrast are manifold, from recent superstitious magic to powerful symbols in ancient worship, objects, art, architecture and cult. Also described are ways of using the sea on land as a magic metaphor and a fundamental point of reference. Related dichotomies and ways of negotiating them, such as the liminal agent, exist elsewhere in the cognitive world of pre-industrial societies, so these ideas could have applications in archaeology.

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