Articles by Giulia Pardi

The Dictionary of Subjects and the TTA are the results of the cataloguing of bibliographical resources. The TTA is a source of archaeological sites (8000 sites in the Mediterranean area, mostly in Tuscany) indexed by category. In TTA a place-name is the logical focus of a record. The record place-name includes the preferred place-name, the variant names and the historical names, the note that provides archaeological information about the place, the relative position in the administrative division of the State, the geographic coordinates (UTM or Gauss Boaga) and the bibliographic sources. The purpose of the TTA is to contribute to the knowledge of the topographical distribution of ancient peoples, with the advantage that the administrative subdivisions reflect those used by the Italian Institutes responsible for cultural heritage.

This contribution deals with the survey of medieval sites in Tuscany, carried out to record territorial, topographical, historical and archaeological data and to integrate these different kinds of sources. It studies the region corresponding to the ancient county owned by the Ardengheschi family, in the south of Tuscany. The collected data are organised into a relational database; its most important tables contain administrative, geographical, environmental, historical and archaeological (descriptive and interpretative) data. Each database record is also geographically referenced by means of the coordinates of the central point of the corresponding site. This organisation makes it possible to investigate chronological and spatial relationships among sites. Some examples show the inadequacy of Euclidean distance and how it can be correctly defined to obtain coherent results; others deal with the definition of “contemporary” settlements, and it is shown how paradoxical results may derive from a “blind” use of database queries. To avoid such consequences, the use of “fuzzy logic” is proposed to define the lifetime of a site, especially if historical and archaeological records span over different periods; an application of fuzzy logical operators is considered in a final example.