Landscapes shared by visibility: a case study on the settlement relationships of the Songgukri culture, Korea

摘要

The Songgukri culture (c. 2900-2400 cal. BP) in the Geum River basin is often regarded as one of the earliest complex societies in the Korean peninsula, based on some evidence for an intensified agrarian economy and social differentiation. This study focuses on landscape visibility as a method of detecting settlement relationships of the Songgukri culture. Two measures of landscape visibility, viewshed size and shared-ness of viewshed (SoV), are examined in this study. Our results indicate that while Songgukri centers tend to have larger visibility of landscape than non-centers, both centers and non-centers share their visible landscape with other settlements at a remarkably high rate. We argue that landscape visibility at Songgukri settlements reflects a shared sense of cultural belonging among settlers, rather than sociopolitical inequality between the elites in centers and the non-elites in other settlements. This study highlights a long-term process, in which bottom-up cultural interactions of Songgukri residents may have contributed to the development of settlement organization and regional communal identities over time.