Until recently, aerial reconnaissance in Europe was performed almost exclusively by British, German and French specialists. Under the influence of traditional paradigms in archaeology, this discipline was considered in almost all countries as a means of detecting new sites rather than an instrument for the study of spatial relations between past prehistoric communities and their areas, on the one hand, and between people and their natural environment on the other. At the same time, national campaigns in aerial reconnaissance have not been completed by systematic applications of other non-destructive field methods which help to evaluate the potential of air survey and which can bring its results closer to the solution of the principal theoretical problems of settlement archaeology. Since landscape archaeology has changed the archaeological paradigm during the last 25 years, data from aerial photographs have been increasingly evaluated. Since the beginning of this decade, countries of Central and Eastern Europe have started up aerial archaeological projects. A close cooperation between archaeologists from once-divided Europe in the field of aerial archaeology has stressed the feeling of common European roots among archaeologists of all periods.