Landscape Archaeology

This website is generated by Jekyll, a static site generator. Static sites do not require complex backend engines, such as databases and software which recreate site content for each visitor. It’s just static files. This translates into a) free hosting (it’s cheap to host static files), b) super-fast websites (no... [Read More]

If anything, archaeologists are much annoyed by messed up chronologies. There are always some “intrusive finds”, “residual artefacts” or “stray objects” that need to be sorted out and removed from the analysis. Archaeological layers almost invariably include small quantities of objects from previous periods that came there either accidentally, for... [Read More]

Several weeks ago I stumbled upon an amusing article on a museum displaying pebbles and rocks resembling human faces, situated in Chichibu, Japan. The stones are called jinmenseki (珍石) and one should be able to recognise human faces in their naturally occurring dents and holes. The founder of the museum,... [Read More]

Hillshade modelling is a standard form of terrain representation in cartography. The idea is to simulate lighting of a terrain from a certain direction (or multiple directions). The method is well known and constantly improved in GIS – as means of cartographic representation. It seems, indeed, difficult to imagine spatial... [Read More]

The basic idea of visibility analysis is to test whether particular locations are theoretically observable from a given observer point (« theoretically » because our data and algorithms can never ideally replicate real-world situations). Such a query yields a yes/no answer for each tested point, which is typically represented as... [Read More]