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'Beautiful collision? Digital and experienced rock art landscapes'
Blaze O’Connor
The study of ancient landscapes has given rise to a diverse range of theoretical and methodological advances over recent years. Many of these approaches have become highly specialised. In some cases they have been applied in isolation from broader studies, and some have come to be viewed as virtually mutually exclusive on the basis of their opposed theoretical foundations. In particular, Phenomenological or experiential approaches, and those employing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology, have been characterised as being at conceptual logger-heads. One draws on the archaeologist’s bodily experience of archaeological landscapes, and has been critiqued as being overly subjective and inductive. The other draws on cartographic representations of landscapes in order to investigate spatial relationships, and has been critiqued as being overly objective and positivist. This paper questions the view that these two approaches are incompatible, and presents the results of recent work on a series of prehistoric rock art landscapes in Ireland. This work combined GIS analyses with field observations on the Inishowen Peninsula, County Donegal, the Dingle Peninsula, County Kerry, and in the Louth-Monaghan region. The latter region formed the focus for further fieldwork, including a landscape-scale geophysical survey and test excavation. In this study, the combination of these two supposedly diametrically opposed means of addressing landscapes has proven to be a fruitful one.