Safeguarding Cultural Heritage in the Urban Fringe: The Role of Legibility

This paper discusses the condition and legibility of prehistoric grave mounds and their landscape context and assesses legibility for experts and lay people by combining archaeological landscape analysis and visual historicity landscape analysis. The paper compares, on the one hand, the heritage object with inherited meanings, and on the other, how it is perceived and understood. The results reveal that legibility in archaeological terms and in visual terms sometimes overlap, but sometimes diverge. Divergences occur when visual legibility of a grave mound is high but where the prehistoric context and legibility are changed. In situations where the context of the mound is preserved and legibility of the mound is high in visual terms, the two overlap. At the fringe, the monuments were mostly both non-visible and had a changed context. Accepting that the prehistoric context has changed, within landscape planning and heritage management, recognising cultural heritage as features in the present-day landscape can be one way forward in urban fringe areas.