From paths to landscape: why does movement contribute to land-use dynamics?

International audienceTwo observations based on the use of lidar data to study past landscapes sit at the origin of this paper.First is the difficulty in interpreting and classifying the physical remains of routes and tracks, and even more so in detecting marks left by individual movement. Problems of detectionSecond is the difficulty in giving meaning to the multitude of segments observed in transport systems in relation to other elements of the landscape: houses, agricultural areas, and spaces for artisanal, commercial and other social activities. Problems of modelling.To address these related problems, our group is developing a framework to guide the identification and interpretation of traces of past movement.In doing so, we would like to avoid a situation where the interpretation of observations is over-interpretation and closes off our minds to other possibilities by classifying each observed feature as a single specific thing, equating one morphology to one type of route and one type of movement, limiting its roles in our mental models of movement. To think more broadly about the processes and manifestation of movement in the landscape, we asked ourselves what role the pathway system plays in it. What are the components that make it up? And how to detect or model these components to understand the dynamics of the whole system of movement as part of how people are using the landscape, framing movement as a type of land use