ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a landscape archaeology approach for the study of the logic underlying location of rural pre-industrial settlements in a Mediterranean region. This task entails the use of GIS for managing and analysing information. The authors apply a non-reconstructive methodology that studies past societies without the need to recreate the morphology of past landscapes. They use landscape information relating to two topics: settlement and geographic data. The latter include several kinds of features. Two of them stand out: terrain morphology (studied through digital terrain model analysis) and land use, for which digital processing of remote sensing images is an important tool. Information is analysed at two scales: surroundings and region. Surroundings are landscape features that relate to settlement location; region refers to relations among settlements. Two ways of interaction between individuals and landscape are considered: mobility and visibility – respectively treated in GIS through cost models and visibility analysis.
