Archaeocartography is an interdisciplinary approach that combines archaeology, geography, history, and cartography. In its strict sense, it consists of the inventory and cartographic representation of archaeological remains, sites, and operations within a given territory. In a broader sense, it seeks to understand how past societies occupied and organized their territory. Through digital mapping tools, it makes it possible to visualize the different layers of the past within present-day space.
Beyond the simple localization of sites, archaeocartography is concerned with ancient landscapes, their transformations, and the traces they have left behind. It may also draw on place names, narratives, and representations when these help illuminate the history and evolution of a territory. In this respect, archaeocartography is close to deep mapping, which combines history, memory, storytelling, and lived experience to better understand a place, and which overlays different periods within a single space in order to reveal its complexity. It also relates to the theory of leylines, which seeks to identify symbolic or functional alignments between ancient sites.