POSITION PAPER: MINDSCAPES AND MAPPING

Maurizio Forte, CNR-ITABC, Rome

The landscape is a dynamic context of different transformations intelligible through the time: cultural, historic, political, social, geomorphologic, geographic, anthropological.
The study and analysis of the archaeological and cultural landscape involve a multidisciplinary approach in order to reconstruct cultures, paleo-environments, mental maps (mindscapes), geomorphology, and settlements in diachronic way. Therefore the diachronic and dynamic reconstruction of the landscape needs to implement different methods and advanced digital technologies: GIS (Geographical Information Systrem), remote sensing, virtual reality, predictive modelling, and multimedia applications.
The main goal of the workshop is to start a multidisciplinary discussion of the digital methods of analysis and 3D representation for the reconstruction of the cultural and archaeological landscapes, from both epistemological and technological perspectives. The complexity of these kinds of contexts tests the most advanced digital technologies in the effort to understand cultural identities, issues and differences through time. The integrated use of GIS, remote sensing, virtual reality and multimedia applications is a fundamental approach for understanding the past and the present and, in the case of this workshop, for interpreting cognitive models of the landscape.
The interpretation or reconstruction of previous cognition is not a simple process. Knowledge is cognitively processed information, and is both represented and the basis of action. Cognitive archaeology, the study of past ways of thought as inferred from material remains, still presents so many challenges to the practitioner that it seems if not a novel, at any rate, an uncertain endeavour.
One goal is to show that people had preferences independent of economic necessity. A second goal is to demonstrate how ideals may be altered or transformed by reality into an amalgam. Settlements and housing location are the results of a series of personal and cultural decisions. The ideal pattern of settlement, in the mind of the ancient people, may be tempered, adjusted and transformed by topographic reality. These ideal forms are grounded in such economic realities as trade and transport, or established upon such cultural realities as heritage, aesthetic norms, or social and religious rules. As archaeologists, one of our ultimate goals is to extract the cultural ideals from the complicated reality in the complex patterns of prehistoric material remains. The interpretation and the knowledge of archaeological landscape is the result of numerous compromises between ideal and real.
Fundamental to archaeology is the interpretation of human behaviour over space and time. Increasingly, spatial aspects of past human activity have been discussed through the theories and methodologies that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have brought to the subject. GIS is typically used to provide a series of hypothetical scenarios of, and alternative perspectives on, the spatial inter-relationships that exist between people and their environments.
Archaeological research has therefore emphasised the need for an integration of anthropological, cultural and social values within ecological variables. Especially the agency debate has re-emphasised the importance of human volition within the creation of an archaeological landscape. Human action is influenced by how groups perceive their worlds and, indirectly and only in part, structured by the accommodation of affordances created by the dynamic interplay between humans and their animate and inanimate surroundings. But human landscapes are really generated through unique human action and interpretation, using both environmental characteristics and socio-cultural understandings. Human social and material interaction is fuelled by habitus and agency. Human agency, representing unique viewpoints based on material culture and landscape (structure) and unique history (narrative), is crucial for human choice and action. It is therefore argued that it is the effects of human agency that structure landscapes and reveal how dynamic surroundings are interrogated and interpreted.