ABSTRACT
Whilst such visual phenomena have long been regarded as important, the acts of ‘seeing’ and ‘looking’ have been very hard to operationalise in any traditional, methodological sense. Concepts such as ‘panoramic’, ‘prominent’ and ‘hidden’ may well be useful heuristics, but are very hard to investigate in practice. Visual characteristics have often been mentioned but rarely explored in any formal and meaningful way. As a result, the incorporation of visibility or intervisibility with archaeological interpretations has tended to be anecdotal, at best. Although a number of techniques were developed through the 1970s and 1980s, it can be argued that the first systematic attempts to exploit the visual characteristics, or properties, of locations came in the early 1990s with the widespread adoption by archaeologists of Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
