Fornborgen och landskapet : En GIS-baserad visibilitetsanalys av relationen mellan bronsålderns fornborgar och dess landskapsrum.

Sammanfattning: For the better part of the 20th century, Swedish hillforts were seen strictly as an iron age phenomenon, and it was not until the mid-1980’s that we had reliable evidence that hillforts were already constructed during the Bronze Age. At the same time, archaeologists were moving away from the old militaristic studies to make way for studies based on the symbolical aspects of these monumental structures. Unfortunately, as we reached the end of the millennium, the general archaeological interest for hillforts dramatically dropped, causing hillfort research to miss out on the digital revolution as the new GIS technology cemented itself as a powerful tool in archaeological research. Today, nine hillforts have received a Bronze Age dating, why it is now possible to preform high quality research on the material without having to include structures from other time periods. However, the lack of GIS-based hillfort research leads us to seek inspiration from British hillfort research where the incorporation of GIS-methodology has proven successful in analyzing the relationship between hillforts and their landscapes. The purpose of this paper is therefore to continue investigating the symbolical aspects of the Swedish Bronze Age hillforts by investigating how GIS can help us locate and understand visual relationship between hillfort morphology and the surrounding landscape.       The analysis is based on a viewshed-method developed by Jessica Murray in her attempts to analyze if hillforts were constructed to visually relate to certain features of the landscape or the local topography. The resulting viewshed rasters are interpreted from a phenomenological theoretical standpoint since phenomenological aspects give us the possibility to bridge the gap between digital and analogue sensory analysis. The results show that viewshed-based analyses can be successfully complimented by phenomenological theory and that the method has successfully replicated previously observed landscape relationships while also exposing previously unknown visual relationships.