In Landscape archeology are there any ‘rule of thumb’ identifying characteristics for old roads and trackways?

Answer 1

There are no easy universal characteristics for identifying old roads and trackways that apply to all of landscape archaeology, because different cultures use different methods to construct their transportation networks, and those can vary over time depending on factors like the underlying landscape and their transportation needs. An easy way to demonstrate this is to look at roadmaps of Boston and New York: both cities were founded around the same time by similar cultures and grew up under roughly the same pressures, but they are fundamentally different in their layouts.

. A lot of archaeology is about pattern recognition. In landscape archaeology, when you learn to recognize the natural patterns in the landscape, then it becomes easier to pick out the places and ways that the presence of humans has disturbed them. Start by asking questions like: does this very long line on the aerial image seem to be unnaturally straight? Is the ground here compacted in a long, extended area that wouldn't naturally form like this? Does this line start and end at known archaeological sites? Is this area unnaturally graded? Has the vegetation been altered to allow human-size creatures suspiciously convenient passage? Is this long area mysteriously devoid of large rocks in an area where there are many large rocks?