Visibility and spatial organization in the prehistoric rock-cut tomb necropolis of Menorca
Submitted: 2025-07-30
|Accepted: 2025-12-03
|Published: 2025-12-08
Copyright (c) 2025 Virtual Archaeology Review
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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Keywords:
rock-cut tombs, intervisibility analyses, geographic information system (GIS), Balearic Islands, Recent Prehistory, funerary landscape
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Abstract:
This paper presents an intervisibility study applied to a set of necropolises on the island of Menorca. 25funerary complexes have been analysed, each comprising a variable number of funerary units. These complexes include caves from different prehistoric periods, ranging from the Late Bronze Age to the Second Iron Age and the Roman period. Among them, both natural caves and the so-called artificial caves (rock-cut tombs) are documented. These artificial caves exhibit notable morphological variability, either for chronological reasons or due to their inherent structural differences. The intervisibility analyses aim to identify mesospatial patterns in the arrangement of caves within each complex, to determine which ones exert greater visual control over the rest and which are more exposed. The results have been cross-checked against previous studies of cumulative visibility and related to the typology of the tombs, examining them from a morpho-architectural perspective. It should be noted that some of the caves that are structurally more complex show a significantly greater investment of labour in their external elements, in some cases, through moulded bands framing the entrances; in other cases, one can observe the excavation of open courtyards in the rock at the funerary chambers entrance. For the analyses, the research team used the Visibility Analysis plugin available in QGIS, a free and open-source software under the GNU GPL license. First, a 1-m-resolution digital terrain model (DTM)was generated from light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point clouds available as open data from the Spanish National Geographic Institute (IGN). Subsequently, intervisibility calculations were run for each funerary complex and the data were compared with the cumulative visibility results obtained in previous work. Raster-based calculations were used to identify the funerary units that exercised greater visual control over the rest and those that, applying spatial statistics, commanded a larger portion of the surrounding territory. To sum up, this set of analyses makes it possible to recognize the caves that play a predominant role within the funerary complexes under study, as well as to formulate hypotheses, both about their spatial articulation and about its possible reflection in the social order of the prehistoric communities that inhabited Menorca during the first millennium BCE.
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