Articles by Domizia D’Erasmo

In the context of the joint archaeological project in Çuka e Ajtoit (Albania) by Sapienza University of Rome and the Albanian Institute for Archaeology, new archaeological field research is being conducted in the Southern fringes of the Albanian territory. The area of interest extends from the site of Butrint (UNESCO Heritage site) to the Albano-Greek border, and corresponds to ancient Cestrine, renowned in the literary sources for its pastoral resources and Trojan connections. The study integrates the freshly acquired information collected during the field campaigns, characterized by a high degree of technological innovation, with old research data poorly published up to present. This paper concerns the photogrammetric processing of historical aerial imagery acquired for mapping purposes by the Italian Military Geographical Institute (IGMI) in the 1930s, during the war context of the invasion of Albania by Fascist Italy. The process resulted in the creation of a DTM and an orthomosaic by using SfM algorithms and GNSS topographical surveys, representing the shape of the landscape of the late 1930s, i.e., before the realization of extensive land reclamation programs by the socialist regime that have determined the radical changes of the current landscape.

Since 2019, the LAD team has been working on the digitisation of the Carte topographique de l’Égypte through a GIS platform. The data contained in this historical cartography, published in the early years 1800s, play a key role in research on the ancient Egyptian landscape, yet they show a still image from the late 1700s. Taking a step towards a Linked Open Data (LOD), this paper illustrates the work of updating the already published dataset of the hydrography of Napoleonic cartography by the LAD team, to which new information useful for the study of the Ancient Egyptian landscape will also be added.