Exploring the topography of mind: GIS, social space and archaeology

Abstract

The later-prehistoric linear ditches that divide the chalk landscape of Wessex, south England, are markers in an area. It is a topographic space. The ditches seem to be placed with a view to their visibility in the landscape. It is a human topographic space. A GIS study of the ditches' place, in terms of what a human sees in moving acros undulating ground, goes beyond that environmental determinism which underlies many GIS studies.

Introduction to the Finger Lakes National Forest Archaeology Project

“…Tiine and space can be readily managed and manipu-lated. These tools have been exploited in various types of prehistoric archaeology, the most common being the development of locational models (Brandt, Groenewoudt, and Kvamme 1992), addressing cognition through the built environment (Zubrow 1994; Llobera 1996), and using GIS as an information management system (Lang 1993;Bosqued, Preysler, and Expiago 1996). As historical archaeologists, the seminar participants deliberately avoided the kind of environmental determinism which has traditionally limited the utility of GIS to historical archaeology.…”

What can GIS + 3D mean for landscape archaeology?

“…These components can be arranged in different ways; however, their meanings change depending on what is placed next to what and on their larger spatial context. These ideas strongly relate to a structuration approach (Llobera, 1996(Llobera, , 2001Daly and Lock, 2004) focused on how landscapes can structure and characterize cultural practices, and using GIS to analyze social spaces on the landscape to study past human meanings and practices. By examining how messages were being communicated, we can better understand what messages were being sent, to whom they were being sent, and why they were being sent.…”

“…Some of these limitations, however, can be overcome and cultural information can be integrated into GIS analyses if they are explicitly grounded in archaeological and/or social theory and interpreted within a society's particular historical, sociopolitical, and ideological circumstances (Llobera, 1996;Lock, 2000;Lock and Harris, 2006). To overcome these shortcomings, archaeologists cannot employ GIS as an unbiased tool.…”

The Automatic Definition and Generation of Axial Lines and Axial Maps

“…Isovist fields also have important surface properties which can be exploited to identify various visual thresholds as can be seen in the subsequent examples in this paper as well as in previous published work (Batty, 2001;Turner et al, 2001). These properties have been exploited in landscape analysis (Llobera, 1996;Rana and Morley, 2002), but in this paper we will simply note these and their relationship to mainstream image and pattern analysis. Indeed, there are alternative approaches which suggest that there are many other kinds of axial geometry that might be used to summarize viewsheds.…”