Reading the landscape: Legible environments and hominin dispersals

Abstract

Wayfinding, or the ability to plan and navigate a course over the landscape, is a subject of investigation in geography, neurophysiology, psychology, urban planning, and landscape design. With the prevalence of GPS-assisted navigation systems, or "wayfinders," computer scientists are also increasingly interested in understanding how people plan their movements and guide others. However, the importance of wayfinding as a process that regulates human mobility has only recently been incorporated into archeological research design. Hominin groups were able to disperse widely during the course of prehistory. The scope of these dispersals speaks to the innate navigation abilities of hominins. Their long-term success must have depended on an ability to communicate spatial information effectively. Here, we consider the extent to which some landscapes may have been more conducive to wayfinding than others. We also describe a tool we have created for quantifying landscape legibility (sensu Gollege), a complex and under-explored concept in archeology, with a view to investigating the impact of landscape structure on human wayfinding and thus, patterns of dispersal during prehistory. To this end, we have developed a method for quantifying legibility using a Geographic Information System (GIS) and apply it to a test case in prehistoric Iberia.

Middle Palaeolithic find spots with Nubian cores from the Southern Negev and the Arava, Israel

“…These two regions represent both geographical and chronological discontinuity with the region consisting of East Africa, the Nile Valley, the Negev desert and Arabia. For a group of hunter-gatherers to disperse across geographical regions the landscape must be legible to them (Guiducci & Burke 2016). Water ways have been shown to facilitate movement of populations (Breeze et al 2016;Scerri et al 2013).…”

Exploring the Influence of the Visual Attributes of Kaplan’s Preference Matrix in the Assessment of Urban Parks: A Discrete Choice Analysis

“…The results of studies have shown that one of the visual attributes of legibility in a landscape is the presence of salient elements. These elements are effective in human perceptions of a landscape and are easily memorized [36].…”

Paleoenvironmental humanities: Challenges and prospects of writing deep environmental histories

“…The vast purview of intricate, multitemporal intercalations of Pleistocene climate and environmental change with peopling and re-peopling processes and hominin population expansions and retractions on both local and global scales also provides the hitherto neglected opportunity to critically investigate the sociocultural appropriation of newly encountered constellations of climate, landscape, and environment. Archeological research on landscape learning (Rockman, 2009) and environmental legibility (Guiducci & Burke, 2016) is of key importance here. This work yields novel insights into those episodes where past humans expanded into unfamiliar territory or where their ambient territories became unfamiliar due to climate change (e.g., Hiscock, 2014) and paleoarcheologists are in a chief position to examine in detail how humans in the long-run-under varying social and material conditions-learned, or failed to learn, previously unknown local and regional climate conditions.…”