GIS and prehistoric landscapes: new approaches in visibility and movement modelling

You are kindly invited to join us on the lecture on new approaches in visibility and movement modelling. On 17th January 2023 at 13.00, Zoran Čučković, PhD, will guide us through GIS and prehistoric landscapes.

GIS or geographic information systems have become an old companion to archaeologists, yet their full potential has remained mostly untapped. Today, we are advancing from common “push button” solutions towards computational approaches where archaeologists design algorithmic procedures.

This presentation deals with several Bronze Age landscapes from Croatia, France and Denmark. It will focus on the analysis of visual marks of territorial appropriation and on the distribution of mortuary monuments, barrows in particular. The landscape can thus be thought of as a theatre where communities stage various signals of group identity or social status, which in the context of Bronze Age societies pertains to the construction of monumental fortifications, hillforts, and the erection of funerary mounds, barrows. GIS analysis will help us to understand better the emitted messages and the public receiving them.

About the author

Dr. Zoran Čučković is landscape archaeologist and GIS specialist working at the University of Clermont Auvergne, France. His main interest is in prehistoric European landscapes (Bronze to Iron Age). In his research, he’s particularly focused to the problem on semiotisation of prehistoric landscapes, i.e. cultural practices which rendered the landscape meaningful, or which elaborated on already existent meanings. This includes the geography of mortuary landscapes and practices of territorial marking. He is also actively involved in the development of spatial analysis algorithms, in particular the visibility analysis, mobility modelling and Lidar data processing. Currently he is a visiting researcher at ZRC SAZU.