Seasonal Visibility and the Panoptic Plantation: Exploring the Use of “Fertile” Landscapes and 3D GIS Visualization Technologies on Plantationscapes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Landscape approaches utilizing line-of-sight profiles and viewsheds to compute intervisibility are far from new techniques in archaeological research. Various well-known works have described the methods and theory used to map visibility on plantationscapes. However, due to a lack of technological capabilities, most have been forced to utilize incomplete datasets, applying analysis to “barren” landscapes lacking buildings, vegetation, or any temporal and/or cyclical fluctuations, particularly concerning local ecologies. As computers and geographic information systems (GIS) technologies expand, however, more advanced visualizations and analyses have become feasible. One area of GIS technology seeing rapid advancement is the expansion of geographically accurate 3D data, which allows the development of interactive perspective models. This paper details the methods and approaches used to build a “fertile” landscape from a historic land plat map depicting Codrington-owned plantations in Antigua, WI, using 3D GIS. In using Viewshed Analysis to examine the local topography (DEM) populated with georeferenced, z-enabled features (buildings, environmental characteristics, roads, and fields) to create a Digital Surface Model (DSM), this research considers the effect of variations in seasonal vegetation on visibility around the estates and their domains to reassess plantation spaces and landscapes of power.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36515.0