While their methods are rigorous and transparent and their outputs clear, all inquisitive, theoretical, empirical and phenomenological approaches to landscape archaeology can contribute to helping society understand its past and design a sustainable future. More immediately, in established heritage practice, the understanding gained from non-invasive techniques of observation, survey and analysis can support decision-making regarding protection, managing and designing change and composing schemes of further, more invasive investigation.
Mapping from aerial photographs, lidar and geophysical survey, all invaluable, depend for maximum utility on applying the logic and language of relative chronology and functional interpretation cultivated in the many ebbings and flowings of the British tradition of analytical earthwork survey. Its use ebbed again in the last couple of decades, but this session will show it now reemerging as a cost-effective tool for rapidly getting to grips in a range of practical situations with a place’s past and potential.