VEiL · Visualising Engineered Landscapes: an archaeological approach to unlock environmental resilience and sustainability in antiquity

Visualising Engineered Landscapes: an archaeological approach to unlock environmental resilience and sustainability in antiquity

Land surveying and division were the first forms of large-scale landscape engineering performed by ancient societies. Centuriation, the iconic Roman systems of land platting into parcels assigned to settlers, which still characterises the rural landscapes of many Mediterranean countries, was undoubtedly the most complex and advanced among them. Despite its impact on contemporary land organisation, however, the principles underlying the design approach used by Roman land commissioners is still largely ambiguous. The VEiL project thus aimed to illuminate the process of landscape engineering undertaken in antiquity and contribute to the discipline of cultural landscape by providing new evidence to inform ongoing discussion. Using the territory surrounding the city of Aquileia as a case study, one of the largest cadastres deployed by Romans up to the 2nd century BC, the overarching objective (OB) of this project was to unlock the rationale underlying the processes of landscape engineering employed by the ancient surveyors. Moving from this overall aim, the project specifically intended to: OB1. identify the land system components and their long-term endurance in the landscape or document their obliteration over the course of subsequent territorial transformations; OB2. hypothesise the pressures responsible for altering through time land division elements and for obliterating them or, contrariwise, the reasons for the persistence of others; discover why the pressures impacted only portions of the territory and how the partition axes degraded; OB3. realise the land division relationship with the primeval landscape and investigate how the original land environmental features may have determined the design of the planned grid; OB4. analyse the elements that ensured the functioning of the land division system as seen as a complex infrastructure that aimed to optimise the settlement of colonists and the movement of goods and people; OB5. enhance and customise the application of diverse fields of Computer vision for automated data collection, analysis, and management. The project outcomes concurred to better understand the approach used by ancient land commissioners in assessing the ecosystem prior to tackling land engineering; established the cadastre module deployed at the case study area; illuminated the mechanism of survival or obliteration of cadastre components; and improved automated mapping of cultural landscape patterns and features.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union