Abstract
While most chapters deal with rather objective parameters that are independent from individuals, this chapter introduces a certain degree of subjectivity by addressing the perception of landscapes. Accordingly, we change our perspective from a distant scientific position to a viewpoint of the ancient observer. We distinguish between sensual and cognitive perception: the former concerns people can see in the landscape, while the latter is about what emerges in the mind. The first step is the analysis of visibility, which is still based upon environmental parameters, while the interpretation of the results strongly draws upon cultural conditions. Since categorising is an important cognitive technique, we have to deal with it, applying a fuzzy classification. Finally, we try to reconstruct a cognitive map, which is intended to map the topology of topographic objects in our mind. Cognitive maps of cultural landscapes are a kind of subjective view of the landscape, which involves transforming distances, angles and symbols. For the distortion of the background map, we need to apply a rubber sheet transformation.
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Nakoinz, O., Knitter, D. (2016). Landscape Perception. In: Modelling Human Behaviour in Landscapes. Quantitative Archaeology and Archaeological Modelling . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29538-1_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29538-1_11
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