Mapping liminality: Critical frameworks for the GIS-based modelling of visibility

Since the widespread adoption of GIS by archaeologists in the early 1990s, analyses of visibility have steadily gained traction, becoming commonplace in landscape and regional analysis. This is in large part due to the routine way in which such products can be generated, bolstered by a raft of landscape-based studies that have placed varying degrees of emphasis upon human perception and direct bodily engagement in seeking to understand and explore the past. Despite this seeming popularity, two worrying trends stand out. The first is the lack of any coherent theoretical framework, applications preferring instead to seek justification in the very first wave of experiential landscape approaches that emerged in the early 1990s. Needless to say, the intervening 20 or so years have seen considerable development in the conceptual tools we draw upon in order to make sense of past landscapes, not to mention considerable finessing of the first-wave developments alluded to above. Second is the tendency to relegate viewshed analysis to certain types of predictable problem or question (i.e. viewshed analysis has become typecast). These trends have been compounded by a host of other issues. For example, whilst there have been refinements, tweaks and variations to the basic viewshed (and the frequency with which they are generated and combined), not to mention establishment of robust calibration criteria for controlling them and statistical approaches for assessing the patterns tendered, these have yet to be brought together in any coherent fashion and their veracity critically assessed. Likewise, a failure to establish an agreed vocabulary has resulted in a number of proverbial wheels being reinvented time and again. The argument presented here is that viewsheds have considerably more to offer archaeology but to realise this entails confronting these issues head on. That this is possible and desirable is illustrated through discussion of a new theoretical framework for visibility-studies that draws upon developments in assemblage theory and the author's own work on affordance and relationality. To demonstrate the value of this approach in encouraging different ways of thinking about what viewsheds are and how we might begin to draw creatively upon them, a case-study is described where viewsheds are folded into a detailed exploration of landscape liminality

Making Megaliths: Shifting and Unstable Stones in the Neolithic of the Avebury Landscape

This paper focuses upon the web of practices and transformations bound up in the extraction and movement of megaliths during the Neolithic of southern Britain. The focus is on the Avebury landscape of Wiltshire, where over 700 individual megaliths were employed in the construction of ceremonial and funerary monuments. Locally-sourced, little consideration has been given to the process of acquisition and movement of sarsen stones that make up key monuments such as the Avebury henge and its avenues; attention instead focussing on the middle-distance transportation of sarsen out of this region to Stonehenge. Though stone movements were local, we argue they were far from lacking in significance, as indicated by the subsequent monumentalization of at least two locations from which they were likely acquired. We argue that since such stones embodied place(s);their removal, movement and resetting represented a remarkably dynamic and potentially disruptive reconfiguration of the world as it was known. Megaliths were never inert or stable matter, and we need to embrace this in our interpretative accounts if we are to understand the very different types of monument that emerged in prehistory as a result

Authenticity, Artifice and the Druidical Temple of Avebury

This paper engages with the legacy of a prehistoric monument – the Avebury henge, in southern England – and the influential work of an early antiquarian – William Stukeley. We highlight how the reception of Stukeley’s 1743 work, Abury: a temple of the British druids, has structured images of Avebury and shaped the authenticity claims of later scholars, artists and religious groups. In biographical terms, Stukeley’s carefully crafted Abury has possessed a very active afterlife, its status shifting from that of primary record (of Avebury), to a form of constructionalblueprint (for Avebury), to a partial and flawed primary record (of an Avebury), only to end up for some as an unassailable and defijinitive record (of the Avebury). At the centre of this narrative is the status of Abury as a material agent around which various authenticity claims have been constructed

Ceramic production in a Roman frontier zone: A comparative Neutron Activation and Petro-Textural analysis of Roman coarse pottery from selected sites on and around the Antonine wall, Scotland.

A series of recent excavations on the 2nd Century AD Antonine frontier forts of the Midland Scottish valley, have produced results which suggest that the army was making its own pottery on an appreciable scale. This was at a time when pottery production was thought to have moved almost exclusively into civilian hands. The possible local ware groups identified by the excavations were largely independent of firm source indicators such as kiln and waster material and the number of available samples was often-small. A program of Neutron Activation and Thin Section petrological analyses was undertaken along with an investigation into Textural Analysis, a facet of the Petrological toolkit. The aim was both to define the site ware groups and a group of specialist vessels thought to be local to Scotland, the Mortaria, and to make statements as to their provenance. Although the Mortaria analysis was limited by problems of sample group size and availability, by improving the objectivity of the statistical handling of the derived data sets and developing methods for the high level study of textural data, the site ware groups were defined successfully at both the "intrall and "inter" site levels. The analyses also furnished interpretations as to the mode and nature of the site production schemes. Through the full analysis of' site Daub samples linked to more traditional provenancing techniques, in all but one case the ware groups could be assigned to the source sites, where contrasting production modes could be identified with military as opposed to civilian production.SER

Introducing visual neighbourhood configurations for total viewsheds

The Visual Neighbourhood Configurations (VNCs) approach is presented: a new approach for exploring complextheories of visual phenomena in landscapes by processing total viewsheds. Such theories most commonly con-cern the configuration of visual properties of areas around locations rather than solely the visual properties ofthe locations themselves. The typical approach to interpreting total viewshed results by classifying cell values istherefore problematic because it does not take cells’local areas into account. VNC overcomes this issue byenabling one to formally describe area-related aspects of the visibility theory, because it formally incorporatesthe area around a given viewpoint: the shape and size of neighbourhoods as well as, where relevant, thestructure and expectation of visual property values within the neighbourhood. Following a brief review thatserves to place the notion of the VNC in context, the method to derive visual neighbourhood configurations isexplained as well as theVNC analysis toolsoftware created to implement it. The use of the method is thenillustrated through a case-study of seclusion, hiding and hunting locales afforded by the standing stone settingsof Exmoor (United Kingdom

More than modal? Exploring affect, affordance, invitation and solicitation

The aim of this chapter is to make a strong case for the adoption of a radically different approach to the archaeology of the senses. This is an approach that focuses not on what is sensed per se (or any ingenious mapping or digital representation of such) but instead the emergent affects that may have arisen in any given sensory encounter, and the impact(s) of such on the assemblage of individuals, things, animals, environments, landscape elements, memories, expectations and anticipations (to name but a few) that were bound up within it. This is not to say that we should abandon attempts to, for example, delineate, visualise, map and analyse what could be seen, heard or smelled. Instead, it is to stress that such efforts should always be treated as a means-to-an-end and never taken as definitive end-products. In the discussion that follows, we build the theoretical framework needed to effect such a re-orientation, drawing upon affect theory and notions of relational capacity and affordance. We then go on to demonstrate the value of this through a case study involving the mapping and exploration of visibility and foreground the unique (yet largely untapped) interpretative potential of virtual, mixed and augmented reality approaches to move beyond mere representation, to instead evoke affects directly

Mapping invisibility: GIS approaches to the analysis of hiding and seclusion

Analyses of visibility have become a commonplace within landscape-based archaeological research, whether through rich description, simple mapping or formal modelling and statistical analysis, the latter increasingly carried out using the viewshed functionality of GIS. The research presented here challenges current obsessions with what is visible to focus instead upon the interpretative benefits of considering the invisible and the complex interplay of visibility and concealment that frequently accompany landscape movement and experience. Having highlighted the difficulties in analysing relational properties such as invisibility and hiding using traditional archaeological techniques, a series of new GIS methodologies are presented and evaluated in the context of an original study of a series of remarkably small, visually non-intrusive prehistoric megalithic monuments. The results serve to challenge dominant interpretations of these enigmatic sites as well as demonstrating the utility, value and potential of the GIS-based approaches developed