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Accepted Paper:

Scale, maps and the senses in landscape archaeology  
David Wheatley (University of Southampton)

Paper short abstract:

This paper will address questions of map perspective, and of 'visualism' in GIS-based landscape analysis focusing particularly on issues of scale.

Paper long abstract:

GIS-based landscape analysis has come under sustained critical attention in recent years, often from a phenomenological perspective. Some have argued that GIS fosters an overly objectified approach to landscape analysis and specifically that undue weight has been given to landscape as a kind of map, and to vision as a means of perceiving the world. This paper will draw on perspectives from embodied cognition and proxemics to argue that, although there is merit in some of these critiques, that it can also be argued that 'map like' perspectives and the visual structuring of landscapes are more general characteristics of human societies than these critiques allow. It is concluded that GIS-based and 'map like' understandings of past human landscapes, including visibility analysis, still have much to contribute to the understanding of past landscapes.

Panel S28
Seeing the wood and the trees: towards a critical multiscalar archaeology
  Session 1