Visibility Graph Analysis of Monumental Buildings in Iron Age Turkey

Summary

Visibility Graph Analysis, or VGA, is a means of evaluating architectural environments based on a number of properties of intervisibility between points distributed within two-dimensional building plans. Created by Alasdair Turner for modern architects as a way to further space syntax analysis (itself based on patterns of accessibility instead of visibility), archaeologists have slowly been incorporating VGA into their work over the past decade. In this paper I outline the stages involved with the method in the standalone program Depthmap to illustrate how easily archaeologists can experiment with it. I then illustrate two case studies of VGA, one from a royal palace at the site of Tell Tayinat (ca. 9th-8th centuries BCE) and one from two monumental gateways at the site of Kerkenes Dağ (7th-6th centuries BCE). In both cases I show how visibility was deliberately deployed by the ancient architects to further the goals of the building projects, whether to emphasize royal authority in the palace or to highlight different religious principles to people entering and exiting the city.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Ancient Architecture and Spatial Technology: A Global Perspective

Keywords

Spatial Coverage