Visibility and Site Recovery in the Cecina Valley Survey, Italy

AbstractOne of the key issues in survey methodology today is the relationship between surface visibility and the discovery of archaeological sites on the landscape. As part of the Cecina Survey in central Italy, a treatment of visibility, which includes aspects of both geomorphology And ground cover, is developed in order to evaluate the strength of this relationship in quantitative terms. The results at Cecina show a strong positive relationship between visibility and site recovery. The spatial variation in visibility and its differential effects on site recovery over the landscape have deep implications for the analysis and interpretation of site distributions recovered during the course of the survey. An attempt is made to introduce a way of correcting for problems of visibility of this kind, concluding with a discussion of some of the wider implications of the results for the planning and conduct of surveys and for the interpretation of their results.