The key element in attaining long-term sustainability will be the formation of a pan-European network of ‘centres of expertise’, to be known as the ArchaeoLandscapes Network (Europe). This cooperative partnership will secure funding from its members and from grant-giving bodies to support a small professional secretariat or ‘nerve-centre’. This in turn will provide expertise, advice and support for organizations or institutions which wish to pursue agreed objectives or to undertake partnership projects within the fields of landscape studies, heritage survey, conservation and public education.

The strength of ArchaeoLandscapes Network will lie in its heterogeneous nature and its total coverage of the countries of Europe, with a membership of 50 or more heritage bodies in the fields of education, research, conservation and public service. It will not rely on any individual institution for its continuing existence and its small secretariat may migrate around Europe over time as staffing opportunities or the availability of expertise dictate. The Network’s members will agree key objectives and policies in the early stages of the present project. These will then be implemented, within and after the lifetime of the project, through a General Management Board of 9 representatives, from the Network’s member institutions. Content-related and technical issues will be tackled and discussed during 5 technical meetings (the first one during the kick-off plenary meeting) scheduled throughout the project’s implementation.

The official launch of the ArchaeoLandscapes Network will be done during the closing project’s conference, held in Frankfurt at the beginning of August 2015.

Working Package leader:

Dave Cowley (RCAHMS) (ex Chris Musson (AARG), William Hanson (Glasgow University))

In many parts of Europe the last decade has seen a surge of interest in the traces of the past, not only in archaeological and historical sites and objects but also in the broader context of the landscapes within which these individual cultural features achieve their full meaning and impact.

A key action within the project will be the use of traditional and new techniques to foster this interest and to show a broader audience how cultural landscapes and heritage sites can contribute to European as well as local identity and ‘sense of place’. The power of aerial images, or the vision of our cities and rural landscapes on GoogleEarth and similar web-sites, can bring this kind of appreciation to a wider audience than that reached by traditional hard-copy publications or carefully-mounted exhibitions.

Traditional methods will nevertheless play a part in the project’s communication strategy. An international traveling exhibition, made of traditional graphic and photographic material as well as video and multimedia devices, will circulate to venues throughout Europe during the second to four years of the project. Following a provisional schedule, the exhibition will be presented in Bucharest (National Museum), Dublin (National Museum), Ljubljana (National Museum), Denmark (Holstebro Museum) and Frankfurt (RGC, Archaeologcial Museum). The exhibition will also be shown at any place in Europe, upon interest and request.

Smaller exhibitions, funded by individual partners as part of their own work within the project, will be displayed at a variety of venues, from local museums and libraries to shopping malls or other public spaces. Moreover, all project partners will be encouraged to undertake ‘public outreach’ initiatives along these lines, including arranging public meetings, giving talks or contributing posters at academic and other conferences, as well as creating digital content in the national language for their own websites and/or for the central website of the ArchaeoLandscapes project. The first such initiatives will be launched in Year 1 of the project and a ‘rolling’ programme will be maintained throughout the following four years.

At least two traditional publications are planned so as to publicize work carried out within the project – reports of colloquia/conferences held in the middle and at the end of the project, and an account of a major study of the First World War Western Front and its aftermath in Belgium. Smaller ‘popular’ booklets and leaflets will also be produced and distributed, explaining the aims and achievements the project as a whole or of particular activities within it.

The main focus in the project’s communication strategy, however, will lie in web-based output that can speak directly to a wider and in particular a younger audience. If the interest and commitment of these previously un-involved members of the public can be captured and then nurtured, public appreciation of the shared cultural heritage of Europe will be enhanced, enjoyment increased and a sense of caring instilled in citizens who would not formerly have realized the significance of these living tokens of the past.

Without this public support, attempts at wider and more sympathetic conservation will always face an uphill struggle. But this is also important to communicate with politicians who may be able to influence the legislative climate, and with professionals whose role it is to care for, conserve and ‘present’ the upstanding and hidden traces of the past. Meetings of various kinds with these two groups will therefore form an essential part of the project’s work programme.

A particular contribution will be made by project partners who already have expertise in both traditional and innovative methods of catching the public and political imagination, such as the staff of the Discovery Programme in Ireland. Others will contribute particular expertise in the presentation of image- and map-based data of the kind needed by cultural resource managers and public service archaeologists in their efforts to protect sites and landscapes through the legal and planning systems.

Technical meetings will enable practical exchange and discussion among the representatives of the partner organizations dealing directly with the communication issues.

Working Package leader:

Anthony Corns (Discovery Programme), Axel Posluschny (Roman-Germanic Commission)

In a field with a relatively small number of professionals, spread thinly across Europe, it is essential to share understandings, skills, experience and research results. Together, the heritage community needs to learn from instances where countries, regions or institutions have managed to make a real contribution to landscape and archaeological conservation through the application of air-photographic and remote-sensing techniques.

The approach in this case will learn from the earlier Culture 2000 projects in framing an effective and economical programme of meetings, conferences, workshops and colloquia on general or specific topics, in some cases carried through to traditional or web-based publication. These will range from large conferences aimed at a broad exchange of experience across Europe to training schools and workshops for 10-25 participants, focusing on specific objectives.

A key feature of the project will be regular technical meetings of the small ‘focus-groups’ which will be addressing a ‘work-pack’ for each of the project’s eight objectives or Actions. These meetings, usually for about 10 participants, will set out work-programmes, monitor progress and coordinate their own activities with those of related focus-groups and of the project as a whole. 3 of such meeting have been scheduled for this action during the project’s duration.

Exchange visits between experts, and placements of 1 to 4 weeks duration, will also figure in the work-programme so as to give students or professionals the opportunity to gain experience and specialist training European countries other than their own. There will be an emphasis on on-the-job learning and specialist instruction by staff or institutions which have made particular advances in data-interpretation, methodology, instrumentation or communication techniques etc.

Working Package leader:

Pete Horne (English Heritage)

The theory and practice of ‘aerial archaeology’ are taught in relatively few universities and polytechnics across Europe. Much the same applies to other forms of remote sensing (ground-based geophysics, airborne laser scanning etc). There is an urgent need to improve the range of opportunities open to intending students, as well as to professionals who wish to extend their range of skills,

This challenge will be addressed by creating contacts, facilitating exchanges and prompting discussion between teachers, professionals working in these fields and those who wishing to apply these techniques in their research or conservation work. The improvement and broadening of course-content will be a priority, with the shared and compared experience of existing teachers and professionals as key factors.

There will be a particular concentration on establishing intensive short-courses in various institutions around Europe so as to increase the opportunity for students and professionals to learn new skills and to experience situations different from those in their own countries.

For those who cannot take part in full-time courses (of whatever duration) the project will create new opportunities through devising multi-lingual ‘distance learning’ material which can be accessed over the Internet. A reasonable basis already exists in texts and illustrations already used by project members and this material will be brought together, refined and made widely available through the skill of partners who have specialist experience in web-based presentation.

The types of courses which could be offered within or outside the project will be discussed between the partners in the early part of the project, so as to identify both existing opportunities and present inadequacies. There may, for instance, be differences between what is needed and what is currently available, either at nationally or internationally. There may be existing courses which could be more intensively exploited, or new types of instruction that could be prompted into existence by project partners individually or collectively so as to provide learning opportunities that do not yet exist across Europe as a whole.

The basis of such courses might lie in structured distance-learning, with course-content created or coordinated by project partners and disseminated through the internet. But a degree of face-to-face learning and instruction will almost certainly be needed in specialist aspects such as satellite imagery, the use of data from airborne laser scanning, the field-collection and interpretation of geophysical data, and the use of remote-sensing data to secure the better understanding and protection of heritage features through public outreach, planning procedures and national legislation.

Year 1 and part of Year 2 will be used, though email exchanges and discussion in Working Party 4, to share experience and ideas between project partners, to identify existing course-opportunities, to explore as-yet unsatisfied needs and to prepare or assemble distance-learning material. The later parts of the project will concentrate on the pan-European exploitation of existing course-opportunities and the initiation of new courses to fill gaps identified during the initial discussions.

A particular, but inevitably long-term, objective will be the creation of a year-long European Masters degree (or equivalent) which will enable students to build up a special range of skills and experience by undertaking learning or research work at various locations around Europe. Selected partners in the network will offer intensive courses of targeted teaching or research, of between 2 weeks and 3 months’ duration. Students will undertake at least two extended placements outside their own country during their year of study, acquiring contacts and opening long-term possibilities for employment outside their native country.

Technical meetings have been scheduled during the 5 years in order to allow the sharing of information and data, open discussion about the partners dealing with this action and work-pack.

Working Package leader:

Włodek Raczkowski (Poznan University)

Europe has a rich but seriously under-exploited inheritance of aerial photographs from the last eighty years, documenting the dramatic landscape transformations of recent decades and containing a wealth of information about as yet unknown (and therefore unprotected) landscape features and archaeological sites from the more distant past.

The very existence of these archives, which are scattered throughout large and small institutions across Europe, is often hardly known in the broader heritage field and their potential for landscape and archaeological studies remains largely un-assessed.. The project will compile at least a preliminary guide to the existence and possible heritage value of these archives. It is recognized, however, that the full exploitation of these archives is a task which will stretch far beyond the lifetime of the present project.

A particularly rich resource lies in the millions of air photographs for all parts of Europe, from World War II onwards, that have recently become accessible in Edinburgh through one of the key partners in the ArchaeoLandscapes project. A key objective, both for the curators of this archive and for other members of the project, will be to help this archive to play a more effective role in heritage documentation and conservation across Europe as a whole.

Students and professional, predominantly from eastern and south-eastern Europe, will visit the Edinburgh archive for periods of 1-3 months to carry out initial identification, geo-referencing and assessing the potential of un-catalogued parts of the collection and documenting previously unrecognized heritage sites and landscapes with a view to their better understanding and (hopefully) long-term conservation. The cataloguing work will also enable significant parts of the collection to be added to the archive’s growing image database available on the Internet.

The many topics related to the issue of mapping, securing a better accessibility and exploitation of air-photo archives will be discussed during technical meetings, and promoted also during international conferences.

Working Package leader:

Birger Stichelbaut (In Flanders Fiels Museum), Sorin Hermon (STARC) (ex Dave Cowley (RCAHMS))

The concentration in this Action will be on providing support, both financial and technical, for aerial and ground-based survey work in parts of Europe where the use of remote sensing techniques is still in its infancy. While Britain, Germany, France and (more recently) Italy have used aerial survey extensively in recent decades there are other parts of Europe where remote sensing and aerial survey have yet to become everyday tools in the armoury of archaeologists and landscape specialists, whether for research, conservation or public communication.

The project will provide partners in Iceland, Scandinavia and other countries with additional help in their attempts to bring these techniques into fuller use in their own countries. Help will also be given for an expansion of survey work in Poland and Romania, for a initiative in Serbia, as well for air photo work of various kinds in different countries. In all of these countries emphasis will be placed on the essential follow-up work of photo-interpretation, mapping and dissemination of the results to specialists and the general public alike.

A particular objective will be to encourage this kind of work in Spain and Portugal, where aerial survey and other forms of remote sensing have so far been little used for exploration or conservation work. Intensive training schools will be mounted at least in Spain, Serbia, Hungary and Denmark, each of them introducing students and professionals to the principles and practice of ‘aerial archaeology’, both in-flight and on the ground.

Smaller and less costly ground-based workshops will be held to introduce students and professionals to photo-interpretation, mapping, LiDAR data analyses, GIS and uses of the results in conservation work. In addition to these ‘practical’ uses stress will also be laid on the role of aerial photographs in catching the public imagination and fostering concern for heritage landscapes and archaeological sites.

Working Package leader:

Hanna Stöger (Leiden University)

The use of satellite imagery for cultural, conservation and communication purposes has long been a goal within archaeology and landscape studies. New possibilities have been raised in recent years through the development of high-resolution satellite systems and other forms of ‘aerial’ recording such as thermal imaging, airborne radar and laser scanning or LiDAR.

LiDAR in particular enables precise digital models of the earth’s surface and, given appropriate manipulation, can even ‘see through the trees’ to previously hidden cultural landscapes and archaeological sites beneath. The cost of commissioning LiDAR or satellite imagery, however, has limited its use within the heritage field. Meanwhile, regional authorities and utility bodies across Europe have been adopting lidar as their preferred method for mapping and landscape modeling.

As a result they now hold an extensive range of LiDAR data, of great potential for landscape and archaeological studies. Considerable technical expertise, however, is required to process the raw data for heritage purposes. The project will therefore support experimentation and skill-sharing amongst partners who can gain access to LiDAR and satellite imagery or who have already used it for cultural purposes. Concentrated efforts will be made to secure the release LiDAR and satellite data originally commissioned for non-heritage purposes.

Techniques such as LiDAR and satellite imaging will strike a chord with the younger generation, whose imagination can often be captured by seemingly ‘magical’ new technologies. The project’s communication strategy will draw on this potential for engaging with this readily approachable target group.

The project will explore the opportunity for presenting its results through Internet-based geographical systems such as GoogleEarth, enabling computerate sections of the community, for instance, to observe and even ‘fly through’ heritage landscapes throughout Europe which would previously have been virtually inaccessible to them. These issues will be discussed among the partners during 5 technical meetings scheduled from 2010 to 2015.

Working Package leader:

Jörg Bofinger (State Heritage Council Esslingen)

An effective way of improving standards in any activity is the dissemination of information on best practice and reports on successful approaches to shared problems or possibilities. Within the relatively scattered heritage community this kind of information-sharing is particularly important, maximizing the value of experience gained in one institution or country by bringing it to the notice of others elsewhere in Europe.

Throughout its life the project will therefore compile and publish recommendations for best practice in such things as specialist teaching, communication with the general public and the use of planning procedures in heritage conservation. Technical guidance will also be issued on such subjects as lidar survey, aerial photography and the Internet presentation of heritage data.

For the most part these notes and recommendations will be presented in down-loadable format on the Internet, to secure wide circulation and allow regular up-dating and the additions. Announcements will be made in the traditional technical and professional press, so as to inform potential readers of their Internet availability.

In this part of its work the project will pay particular attention to best practice in conservation work and heritage management, including statutory provisions and practice in national legislation, and planning procedures throughout Europe. In this way lessons learned in one country will inform heritage professional elsewhere about provisions or procedures of potential relevance to their own particular situations. 3 technical exchange and discussion meetings are scheduled in 2012, 2013 and 2014.

Working Package leader:

Michael Doneus (Vienna University)