ABSTRACT
Stone walls are relics of an historical agricultural civilization that once flourished in 18th and 19th century New England. With advancements in remote sensing technologies, long linear features such as stone walls can be identified remotely and quantified across large areas. This chapter presents a case study in which the available record of land use and land cover (LULC) as well as present day parcel boundaries, protected open space, and roads are integrated with high-resolution imagery in order to assess the persistence of human land use based on the temporal distribution of stone walls and recent characterizations of the natural and anthropogenic landscape. In this study, we find support that the presence of stone walls continues to be deeply connected to the ways in which land is used and defined. Additionally, this chapter promotes the utilization of stone walls in studying land use history and the driving factors of landscape change.
