This paper describes the history and current state of archaeological visibility studies. The first part is a survey of both GIS (geographic information systems) and non-GIS studies of visibility by archaeologists, which demonstrates how advances in GIS visibility studies have tended to recapitulate, albeit over a compressed timescale, theoretically driven developments in non-GIS studies. The second part presents an example of the kind of methodological development required for the use of GIS to contribute to the agenda set by certain strands of a more humanistic archaeology. An algorithm developed to retrieve various summaries of the inclination at which points on the horizon are visible from a specified viewpoint was applied to nineteen recumbent stone circles in the Grampian region of Scotland. The results suggest that these summaries provide a useful tool for ‘unpacking’ what archaeologists mean when they claim that the topographic setting of certain stone circles creates an ‘impression of circularity’.