I Can See Clearly Now!: Successfully Implementing Visual Analysis into Cultural Resource Management Projects

Summary

Visual analysis is one method used to assess indirect effects of an undertaking on cultural resources that are eligible or potentially eligible for the National Register. Viewshed analysis is commonly used to implement the visual analysis; however, to accurately assess the indirect effect, the overall scope of a project must be tied to the project activities. Perspective analysis can be used to determine the project’s visibility distance, or the maximum distance at which project activities are discernible by the human eye. Using perspective analysis combined with viewshed analysis, it is possible to determine the extent to which project activities are visible more accurately than just calculating viewsheds. Data generated from viewshed and perspective analysis can then be used to in visual simulations to represent the indirect effects. This presentation will discuss several case studies where visual analysis was used to assess the indirect effects of a project on cultural resources.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage