J Archaeol Sci 33 (3)

The authors argue that archaeological interpretation of past land management practices can be greatly enhanced through examination of soil thin sections; that features relating to manuring practice are among those key to interpreting agricultural practices; that the sources and the processes leading to the distribution of these manure materials may further improve knowledge of the past landscape utilisation and that the use of quantitative analyses to examine soil thin sections opens the possibility of considering these relationships between manured areas in greater detail and to extract more subtle spatial and temporal changes in past management. In this study the validation of this methodology has been tested with quantitative image analysis methods used to examine manure inputs to a well-documented historical landscape of Papa Stour, Shetland, where intensive manuring has been practised until the 1960s. By using both historic and ethnographic evidence to validate the image analysis protocol, differences in spatial and temporal distribution are examined for the practices of manuring with both fuel residues and with turf. The validation of the hypotheses expected from ethnographic and historical data that quantitative soils-based evidence allows the definition of variations in manuring strategies and provides a more secure basis from which to interpret manuring management strategies in archaeological landscapes.

Visibility is often understood to play a significant role in the placement of cultural objects within past landscapes. In recent years, GIS-based visibility studies have become popular as a method for assessing the role of views to and from sites and features. A significant drawback to these analyses is that they do not take into account how far an object can be clearly seen and recognized. A number of factors influence the visibility of objects, including the limits of human visual acuity, environmental effects such as atmospheric extinction, and the physical properties of object and surroundings. Current approaches that attempt to account for these influences focus on defining visual zones, but are limited because they do not directly address object size. A fuzzy viewshed approach, modified to account for target size, is suggested as a solution for assessing the level of visibility of cultural objects in past landscapes.