The aims of agricultural land management change continuously, reflecting shifts in wider societal priorities. Currently, these include addressing the climate crisis, promoting environmental sustainability, and supporting the livelihoods of rural communities while ensuring food security. Working toward these aims requires information on the character of agricultural land and how dynamic processes influence it. Remote and near-surface sensing data are important sources of information on the characteristics of soils, plants, water, topography, and related processes. Sensing data are collected, analysed, and used in decision-making by specialists in multiple domains connected to land management. While progress has been made to connect the use of sensing data across agricultural and environmental applications under the umbrella of integrated sustainable land management, archaeological and heritage uses of these data remain largely disconnected. This creates barriers to accounting for the impacts of past human activities on contemporary agricultural landscapes through the alteration of soils, topography, and plant communities. In parallel, it hinders the creation of knowledge about the archaeological features which form an essential part of the heritage of agricultural landscapes. The ipaast-czo project explores the potential of a coordinated approach across all these domains, which would reduce these barriers and provide benefits by better integrating information generated using sensing. To do so, both conceptual and practical barriers to developing shared practices and how these might be overcome were considered. In this study, a conceptual framework designed to create a shared understanding of how agricultural landscapes work and enable collaboration around their management was proposed. This framework treats present-day rural agricultural landscapes as Critical Zones: complex entities shaped by long-term human–environment interactions including contemporary farming. Practitioners in precision agriculture and archaeological remote and near-surface sensing, as well as users of these data, were engaged using workshops and interviews. The relationships between practitioners’ objectives, data requirements for their applications, and their perceptions of the benefits and disadvantages of changing working practices were interrogated. The conceptual framework and assessment of practical benefits and challenges emerging from this work provide a foundation for leveraging shared sensing data and methods for long-term integrated sustainable land management.

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ResumenEl propósito de este trabajo es proponer algunos puntos de reflexión acerca de la manera de concebir el estudio arqueológico del paisaje, así como sobre el papel que juega en este la prospección de superficie. Se llama la atención sobre la robustez de las propuestas teóricas de los años 80 y 90, y se reclama la necesidad de continuar articulando nuestra praxis siguiendo la pauta de programas de investigación coherentes y bien estructurados. De manera más amplia se plantea el potencial que tiene en esa dirección renovar una apuesta por una "arqueología agraria", reivindicando la valía de conceptos que encierran aún un vasto potencial de desarrollo en la investigación española. En concordancia con todo ello se señala la importancia de diseños metodológicos de prospección adecuados para afrontar el tratamiento de la compleja realidad de los paisajes agrarios. Se expone en este sentido una revisión de tendencias recientes así como de desafíos para el futuro, especialmente en lo referente a la documentación de la evidencia off-site. Finalmente, se plantean algunas propuestas acerca del sentido y utilidad de "espacios híbridos" de investigación, orientados a lograr una aproximación realmente diacrónica del estudio de los paisajes culturales. AbstractThe aim of this paper is to offer some thoughts about the way we conceive archaeological study of landscapes, and the role played by surface survey on it. We stress the robustness of theoretical proposals of the 80`s and 90`s in Spain. We claim for the need of continuity in guiding our praxis by coherent and well structured research programmes. In a wider sense, we pose the need of renewing