Aerial Archaeology in Ireland - The Heritage Council

: Eochla stone fort, Inis Mór, Aran Islands, Co. Galway (Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government)
To get closer to the ways in which people and landscape really change means breaking out of some of the constraints of
long-cherished categorisations of sites and chronologies. The complexity and seamlessness of landscape and social change —
stretching from the distant past forwards into the future and operating at different rates and scales — has long been recognised,
and aerial photography has had an important role in understanding landscape and presenting it to a wider audience (Figure 45;
Norman and St Joseph 1969; Aalen et al. 1997). Historic landscape character is gradually becoming more widely recognised and
better understood, assisted by being more readily articulated through GIS systems. As a result, traditional site-based systems for
managing archaeological data look increasingly inadequate as a means of capturing such rich evidence of long-term social and
environmental change.
83