Visibility and movement: towards a GIS-based integrated approach

A continuing theme since the initial adoption of GIS technology by archaeologists has been the modelling of visibility and movement as ways of understanding past landscapes and he people who inhabited them. The underlying issues have been fully explored elsewhere and here we briefly introduce only the main points relevant to the work presented in this paper. Modelling visibility and movement is usually justified through an interest in "perceiving the landscape" and an attempt to move GIS-based analysis away from "detached objectivism" (describing landscape as if viewing from a distance) towards "situated subjectivity" (trying to understand landscape from experiencing it directly).