ABSTRACT
How we interpret the visual world is a combination of perception and comprehension. Perception may differ from person to person, yet the scientific laws by which the Earth is observed are immutable. It is the crossroads of perception and comprehension where we can place the field of remote sensing. While the science behind remote sensing is fairly well understood, how researchers can interpret the meaning behind what they see is not. Everyone’s eyes remotely sense through their own unique “lens” that provides each person with a completely different perception of the world surrounding them. Transforming alternative perceptions into a common archaeological approach would at the outset seem unlikely. What one archaeologist sees as a stable, another would see as a storehouse (Holladay 1986). There are countless additional examples of similar archaeological debates. If archaeologists cannot agree on defining the meaning of basic structures, can they adopt similar approaches for characterizing entire past landscapes for feature location from space? Every landscape is different, depending on weather, climatic conditions, population density, seasonality, and innumerable additional environmental and anthropogenic factors. Similar things affect satellite imagery (Hirata et al. 2001).
