This paper offers a contribution to discussion of the value of integrating different airborne perspectives for landscape prospection. A case study in Bohemia, Czech Republic, illustrates how the integration of the results of a long‐term programme of aerial reconnaissance and recently acquired airborne laser scanning (ALS) (LiDAR) data has significantly improved the methodology and knowledge dividend for the study of past landscapes and settlements. Three types of features – barrows/ring ditches, a hillfort, and a nineteenth century artillery redoubts – have been surveyed repeatedly in order to detect the degree to which sites known from differential cropmarking in arable crops are also evident in ALS‐derived digital terrain models (DTMs), and vice versa. It is noted that components of the hillfort and redoubts are clearly evident in the DTMs despite lying in fields that have been intensively cultivated for many decades at least, and are not easily recognized from the ground because their outline is so smoothed. This study illustrates the complementarities of cropmark aerial survey and ALS even in heavily ploughed environments, where there is often an assumption that features recorded as cropmarks have no surface expression, when in fact this often depends on the scale of the features. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.