Abstract
Between the 12th and 14th centuries, Medieval Iberia’s military-religious frontier was a volatile, fluctuating band of contested space that tenuously bisected the peninsula into Muslim and Christian controlled territory. On both sides, the structures that best exemplified the material efforts to retain newly gained territory were the hilltop and spur castles occupied by frontier settlers from the interior of each side of the conflict. These castles—which are nearly as ubiquitous as windmills in images of central Spain—are often photographed as crumbling bits of crenellation set sharply against the sky. Even images captured within these fortresses tend to use the extant masonry as a frame for sublime views of the landscape below. Rather than attempt to separate the indelible connection between landscape views, topographic siting and architectural fabric at these sites, this paper will alternate between looking away from, and within these fortresses through two methods of remote sensing. The first is a series of viewshed analyses set from the observation points of over seven hundred fortresses, monasteries and towns during a two hundred year period. This GIS process employs a digital elevation model of the surrounding landscape to ask not only which frontier institutions occupied which fortresses during any month between 1150 and 1350 CE, but also what portions of the surrounding landscape the occupiers could see at that time. The second remote-sensing method combines an array of digital light meters to calculate volumetric visibility for spaces within a 3D model of the 14th century fortress-monastery headquarters for the military order of Montesa. The combination of the volumetric and GIS viewshed analysis methods will reveal how frontier institutions valued landscape visibility as a measurement of security and surveillance, while also acknowledging how vision affected architecture-scale decisions at a military-monastic complex on the frontier.
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Notes
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For an overview of works concerning the medieval Iberian frontier see: (Moreno et al. 1994; Castro 1971; Glick 1995; Feliciano and Rouhi 2006; Burns 1990; Forey 1984; Gerrard 2000; Pick 2004; Safran 2013; Bartlett et al. 1989; For medieval Iberian frontier studies in the fields of Art and Architectural history see: Robinson (2011), Dodds et al. (2008), Watt (2011).
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It is possible to clone all the light meters in place and invert their orientation, yet calculating this many light-meters is extremely unstable within 3DS Max and it would require additional programming to replace all zeros with the same XYZ location with a one when the CSV files were combines. The additional problem is rigging the lights so that no matter how glancing the light on a particular node, the node will read as 1 for a single light, 2 for two lights/viewers etc. As the software is currently configured, this is not possible.
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Triplett, E. (2016). Visualizing Medieval Iberia’s Contested Space Through Multiple Scales of Visibility Analysis. In: Forte, M., Campana, S. (eds) Digital Methods and Remote Sensing in Archaeology. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40658-9_9
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