[2] Cultural landscapes, on the other hand, are environments that have been altered in some manner by people (including temporary structures and places, such as campsites, that are created by human beings).
Advances in survey technology have permitted the rapid and accurate analysis of wide areas, making the process an efficient way of learning more about the historic environment.
Global Positioning System, remote sensing, archaeological geophysics, Total stations and digital photography, as well as GIS, have helped reduce the time and cost involved in such work.
Within the discipline of historical archaeology, specifically within the United States, landscape archaeology initially gained prominence with efforts to preserve the homes and gardens of prominent North American figures (see George Washington's Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello), the reconstruction of early colonial settlements (see Colonial Williamsburg) and the analysis of gardens (see Annapolis).
Beginning in the mid-1700s, wealthy elites began to construct large, stately homes and neat, ordered gardens with the guise of mapping superiority and exclusive knowledge onto the landscape.
[8] Although the Baroque and Renaissance styles were out of date by the time elites in the United States employed them, this was intentionally done to communicate a knowledge and appreciation of British history that few within the community would have access to.
[8] Archaeologists have concluded that the symmetrical, geometric, designs of garden-scapes adopted by colonists in the mid eighteenth to nineteenth centuries made use of "...converging and diverging lines of sight to manipulate the relationship between distance and focal point", making objects appear larger or further away than they really were.
The landscape also provided an area where "values like orderliness, gentility, and abstinence were important elements of a middle-class culture that, while subject to variability, was nevertheless part of daily existence.
Barbara Voss has done extensive archaeological work to reveal how ideas about gender, sexuality, marriage, and ethnic/racial intermarriage were mapped onto the landscape of Spanish Colonial mission sites in California (El Presidio de San Francisco).
Voss' interpretations reveal the lived trauma that is often concealed by popular, romanticized, narratives of relationships established through colonial contact between indigenous peoples and Spanish colonizers[20] The mission landscape became physical and conceptualized space where two genders (male/female) and heterosexuality were to be explicitly expressed and reinforced.
It has been argued that the existence and continued use of yard spaces among Black Americans (along with other African-derived practices observed in the Americas) is proof of a distinct, new world, cultural identity.
[22] Mintz further states that while the house "…is usually used mainly for sleeping and for storing clothing and other articles of personal value" the yard is where "…children play, the washing is done, the family relaxes, and friends are entertained".
The ornamental yards of the agent's house and overseers' block signal an important shift in the type of urban space being produced and the manner in which it was utilized."
[26] Total archaeology aimed to understand sites in their contexts, studying landscapes as a whole and incorporating methods traditionally used by historians, geographers, geologists and anthropologists.
Some years later, in the 1970s, spatial archaeology was created, based on the use of several tools taken from 1960s English Human Geography that was focus on the study of location interdependence.
[further explanation needed] In 1989, Javier de Carlos said that archaeology was only able to apply geographical techniques without being able to use a procedure integrated in a method.