Visibility Network Patterns and Methods for Studying Visual Relational Phenomena in Archeology

A review of the archaeological and non-archaeological use of visibility networks reveals the use of a limited range of formal techniques, in particular for representing visibility theories. This paper aims to contribute to the study of complex visual relational phenomena in landscape archaeology by proposing a range of visibility network patterns and methods. We propose first- and second-order visibility graph representations of total and cumulative viewsheds, and two-mode representations of cumulative viewsheds. We present network patterns that can be used to represent aspects of visibility theories, and that can be used in statistical simulation models to compare theorised networks with observed networks. We argue for the need to incorporate observed visibility network density in these simulation models, by illustrating strong differences in visibility network density in three example landscapes. The approach is illustrated through a brief case study of visibility networks of long barrows in Cranborne Chase.