Computing and testing extensive total viewsheds: a case of prehistoric burial mounds in Bohemia

Abstract

This paper reports on the progress in the field of total viewshed computation, which was made by the joint efforts of several Slovak and Czech research institutions. The result of the project is eight total viewsheds calculated for the whole territory of Bohemia (57,000 km2) with a relatively high resolution (grid from 5 × 5 to 320 × 320 m, visibility radii from 0.5 to 64 km). Through the principal component analysis, the viewsheds were further processed and derived datasets were created defining the most important gradients of visual affordances of the Bohemian landscape. On a sample of archaeological sites (barrow cemeteries from a part of South Bohemia), it was examined how the resulting models could be interpreted and whether the identified visibility gradients affected people's behaviour in the past, namely the location of their funerary monuments. On the one hand, this study shows that non-random relationships of this type existed, but on the other hand, visibility itself may not always have been the only (or the main) factor in past behaviour, even if it is related to above-standard places in terms of visibility. All total-viewshed datasets are made available for further research through public repository.