Remarks on the understanding landscape in archaeology

Landscape Archaeology and GIS, 2006

in M. Forte (ed.), The Reconstruction of Archaeological Landscapes through Digital Technologies. Proceedings of the 2nd Italy-United States Workshop, Rome, Italy, November 3-5, 2003 Berkeley, USA, 2005

Our paper will start from exploring briefly the situation of GIS applications in the archaeological research fieldwork at the beginning of our century, looking at the capabilities and limits until now reached and discovered and will continue by proposing a new theoretical and practical Object-Oriented relational approach for the study of complex archaeological landscapes. Most of archaeologists have been captured finally by new computing technologies believing stili now that sophistication of powerful and expensive GIS software will be enough for high quality outputs and high levels of interpretation. For us, GIS is a set of techniques that at this stage help archaeologists to visualize and to manage huge amounts of georeferenced data and to execute some basic spatial analyses. Spatial Analysis offers several tools to allow archaeologists to move to more complex explanations. Therefore, the purpose of our paper will be to show how with well defined archaeological problems and starting from a well based theory, we can integrate some already existing tools in a GIS framework, moving in such way from beautiful images to complex analyses. Nowadays, most of GIS based archaeological projects are simple databases with a discrete representation of archaeological data in a 2D static space, with functionalities limited to primitive geometric operations used for the calculation of simple and basic relationships or for execute queries and summary descriptions between points (sites) or lines (ancient roads, streams, etc.) or areas (artifact concentrations) in a space. The result is that we have GIS used for the inputs of a huge quantities of data indiscriminately over a map, producing as final results a lot of maps but a lack of theories or hypotheses about the kind of problems archaeologists need to solve and about the relationships between spatial data.

Archaeological Prospection, 2009

2005

Landscape archaeology is a recently emerged and very lively branch of archaeology. Its origins go back at least two centuries, to amateur interests in local history and to the writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Hazlitt on the English countryside and its inhabitants. Various developments in archaeologytechnical, epistemological, ideologicalhave helped to convert these earlier approaches into a more professional field of enquiry. Sophisticated aerial and satellite photography has made visual access possible to ancient settlements and agricultural sites whose very existence might previously have been a matter only of conjecture. Within archaeological theory, there has emerged the notion of a 'ritual landscape', registering the thought that relentless attention to 'sites', such as Stonehenge, may be myopic, since these have their significance only in the context of the much wider environments in which human beings conducted their lives. Finally, landscape archaeology appeals to those who applaud a certain 'demotic' tendency in contemporary archaeology, its shift of focus on to the lives of 'ordinary' people, such as farmers and foragers, in past centuries. This is because the evidence for how they once lived is often more likely to be found in the land than in remnants of buildings and artefacts at sites.

ArchéoSciences, 2009

Revue d'archéométrie 33 (suppl.

Journal of Archaeological Research, 2001

This review calls for the definition of a landscape approach in archaeology. After tracing the development of the landscape idea over its history in the social sciences and examining the compatibility between this concept and traditional archaeological practice, we suggest that archaeology is particularly well suited among the social sciences for defining and applying a landscape approach. If archaeologists are to use the landscape paradigm as a "pattern which connects" human behavior with particular places and times, however, we need a common terminology and methodology to build a construct paradigm. We suggest that settlement ecology, ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes will contribute toward the definition of such a broadly encompassing paradigm that also will facilitate dialogue between archaeologists and traditional communities.

Mediterranean Archaeological Landscapes, 2004

This article is about the landscape comprehension using concepts as a technic-scientific period and the informational media and the interfaces between technology and the infrastructures, becoming necessary the review the recent accumulated layers on the landscape. The cultural landscape transforming, the urban landscape layers, processed at the time. This new methology has an important role for the urban projects future applications. 1 An archeology (from Greek archei -ancient, plus logia -discourse, ordering) The landscape archaeology as an environmental project instrument Principles and Concepts for development in nowadays society -The landscape archaeology as an environmental project instrument 1480 In the late eighteenth century, from the pioneering excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Europe plunged into a fever of archaeological discoveries, motivated by the birth of modern scientific procedures and the richness of the legacy of the peninsula civilizations, the Greeks and Romans. Archeology, which according to PERINETTI:1975:13, was called by Plato "the history of the ancient heroes and races and of the origins of the city", was linked from then on to the monuments and artifacts of the ancient civilizations, whose search began to touch the Mediterranean, then Africa and later the Americas. As research progressed, deeper into remote time was entered and scientific possibilities allowed for more and more distant times to be specified. Overlapping archaeological layers began to be identified more precisely, and the idea of civilizational overlaps was finally proven in the 20th century. (TRIGGER:2004) Wars, forced domination of one city over another, trading interests and architectural typologies were revealed in successive layers, demonstrating the processes of reuse and subjugation of the weaker cultures, of the vanquished. Regionalisms started to be identified in time and Geography, discussed philosophically since ancient times, by the Greeks (MORAES: 2005: 49-58). It was now necessary to explain more concretely the spatialization of the finds. First, a physical geography, of a deterministic nature, and then, in the reading of the landscape, the discovery of the evolution of the view of nature, fruit of the discussion of the relations between society and its environment, bringing new parameters for the establishment of the so-called Human Geography, today an important basis in the discussions about Landscape. However, another phenomenon occurred, almost concomitantly: industrial civilization rushed to profoundly alter the geographical environments of its existence, causing urban agglomerations never before seen in the history of settlements. Cities, social artifacts, thus became an inexhaustible source of daily transformations of a landscape that starts to suffer overlaps of layers that are increasingly rapidly configured. Then the recognition of new forms of urbanization, through the implantation of large manmade geographical objects. It is unquestionable, then, the need for a new archeology of the landscape, based on the visible present, that finds the closest testimonies of the transformations and processes materialized and superimposed in a society of velocities. This is an industrial archeology of the landscape in the cities and urban extensions.