[1] In contrast, phenomenology proposes a 'humanized' space which is embedded with meaning and is created through praxis (actions, rituals, social events, and relationships between people and places).
Others, however, have found the framework useful in analyses using Geographical Information Systems and Virtual Reality Modeling, despite early phenomenologists in archaeology rejecting these representations in favor of embodied experiences.
"[6] Phenomenological techniques seek to understand this humanized space to gain further insight to how peoples living in hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies related to those landscapes.
[4] By paying close attention to, and documenting, their bodily engagement with the archaeological site and landscape, Tilley says that archaeologists can use phenomenology to better understand prehistoric humanized space.
[4] Therefore, representational forms of archaeological features such as diagrams, pictures, statistical analyses, geographic information systems, simulations, or narrative descriptions are said to be inadequate to produce phenomenological knowledge or understanding, as they cannot be substituted for first-hand experience.
It can also provide experiences of a place that may not be available today by reconstructing elements of the landscape, removing modern structures, or simulating different environmental contexts.
[17] Nevertheless, Pollard and Gillings say that their efforts in Virtual Reality Modeling are not intended to replace direct observation entirely, as it is impossible to simulate all of the bodily experiences of being at an actual place.
[15] According to Joanna Brück, phenomenology "has provoked considerable discussion within the discipline",[3] receiving criticism from members of the archaeological community who deem it to be "unscientific" and "subjective".
[18] Brück says the crucial phenomenological question is "whether contemporary encounters with the landscape [...] can ever approximate the actual experience of people in the past" [3] and that, in spite of Christopher Tilley's claim that the common use of human bodies between archaeologists and past peoples implies that both groups will engage with the material world in a similar way, the body itself is culturally constituted and bodily engagement with the world will be shaped and controlled by social norms and practices.
[20][21] It was also used to develop an understanding of the famous Neolithic villaggi trincerati of the Tavoliere Plain in Puglia, Italy, in an effort to more explicitly define phenomenological methodologies.