Articles by Anna De Meo

The district of Laredo is located in the middle valley of the Moche River, along the northern coast of Peru, near the city of Trujillo. Since pre-Hispanic times, this area has been characterized by continuous processes of occupation, documented through irrigation systems, monumental earthen architecture, and road networks connecting the valley with inland regions. Today, these archaeological remains coexist with agricultural landscapes of colonial origin, industrial infrastructures linked to sugar production and contemporary settlements, forming a complex and stratified cultural landscape that remains little known and undervalued. This territorial heritage can be fully understood only when considered as a whole and analyzed through a multiscale approach – territorial, urban, and architectural. The research is based on the development of a GIS platform designed to integrate, manage, and analyze environmental, archaeological, and architectural geo-datasets at different spatial scales. The GIS-supported spatial analyses made it possible to reconstruct settlement dynamics from the Lithic Period to the modern era, to explore relationships between sites, infrastructures, and environmental factors, and to define criteria for the sustainable management and enhancement of the historical landscape and earthen heritage of the middle Moche Valley.

In this paper, the results of a scientific collaboration between the Institute of Etrusco-Italic Archaeology, the Institute of Technologies Applied to Cultural Heritage and the Civic Museum of Magliano Sabina are presented. The aim of this research is to study the distribution of archaeological sites in the territory of Magliano Sabina (Tiber Valley) and their relationship with the environmental-historical context. This area is a section of the Tiber Valley, where the river has always represented an important element from an historical point of view. In the present day in this area the river no longer follows its original course, so it was decided to find its old course in order to better understand the distribution of the ancient settlements in this territory. On the basis of research carried out at the Archivio di Stato di Roma it was possible to verify that the river Tiber originally flowed in the lower part of Magliano Sabina, nowadays the area of “Piana di Ramelli”. The study of historical cartography allowed us to verify the change of the river course since 1589, the year of the construction of the “Felice” bridge. The data has been confirmed by the morphological and geological characterisation of the selected study area. A GIS of the area has been used to compare and integrate all data sets with the aim of producing thematic maps to better understand the environmental evolution of the territory of Magliano Sabina.

The aim of this work is to contribute to a better understanding of the historical and archaeological heritage. Archaeological and territorial data have been collected and processed in a GIS in order to provide information on the evolution of the population settlement in a selected area used as a case study. The area investigated was that located between the rivers Nera and Aniene (North-South direction) and between the river Tiber and the Sabine Mountains (East-West direction). It is historically identified as the “Sabina Tiberina” region. This area is characterised by a large number of sequential settlements of different populations beginning in the Iron through to the Medieval period. The GIS developed offers the possibility of describing and interpreting the territorial changes caused by the various populations. One of the main features of the GIS is its easy use for non-expert users (such as teachers, students and decision makers). Examples of different types of maps that can be generated by our GIS are presented. Two examples of composite maps containing different types of information (geographical, historical, geological etc.) are presented to show the possibilities afforded by the system.