Soundscapes in the past: Investigating sound at the landscape level

During the past few decades, researchers have developed methodologies for understanding how past people experienced their wider world. The majority of these reconstructions focused upon viewsheds and movement, illustrating how individuals visually observed their environment and navigated through it. However, these reconstructions have tended to ignore another sense which played a major role in how people experienced the wider, physical world: that of sound. While the topic of sound has been discussed within phenomenology at the theoretical level, and has been approached at the site level through the growing study of “acoustic archaeology,” there has been limited practical application at the landscape level. This article illustrates how GIS technology can be utilized to model soundscapes, exploring how people heard their wider surroundings.