Abstract

This paper explores the contribution of total viewshed analysis for understanding long-term human settlement pattern choices on the island of Antikythera, Greece. A 'viewshed' is a GISc term that describes the set of locations (grid cells) within a landscape that can be seen from a single observation point. A 'cumulative viewshed' (Tomlin 1990) is the sum of a set of viewsheds that tells us how many observation points can see each location. A 'total viewshed' is identical to a cumulative viewshed except that all locations are used as observation points, and thus the end product is a representation of the visual magnitude of each location on the landscape–-what Llobera describes as a first description of the visual structure for an entire terrain (Llobera 2003: 34). The essential point in regard to human behaviour, however, is that the visual structure of a landscape has an impact on the human experience, understanding and/or use of that landscape. As the visual structure of a landscape can be modelled using GIS software, it becomes possible to examine empirically the relationship between this structure and the spatio-temporal variability of human activities in that landscape. In this paper I outline the total viewshed analysis of an island in the southern Aegean (Antikythera) for which we have long-term settlement pattern data (over seven millennia) in order to test the hypothesis that the visual characteristics of the landscape had an impact on settlement location.