Viewing places: GIS applications for examining the perception of space in the mountains of Sicily

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are increasingly used to appreciate how past people experienced their world. Two key approaches, visibility and cost surface studies, have been the dominant form of analysis to help archaeologists to reconstruct and visualize space, in other words to help archaeologists understand what it was like to be ‘there’ in the past. This paper seeks to question the use of these analyses in Mediterranean landscape archaeology with a discussion of the results from a series of interviews with the inhabitants of Troina, a town in the Nebrodi Mountains of Sicily. Focusing on the visualization of the results from a photo elicitation study, I aim to show how people construct images of the space in which they dwell. The results suggest that we need to review the assumptions that we make about landscape perception in archaeological research and the (GIS) methods we use to study them.