Articles by Carmine Pellegrino

The paper is dedicated to the Geographic Information System developed for the filing and the analysis of Pontecagnano necropolises, where over 10400 tombs dated from the Etruscan to the Samnite phase (9 th-3rd century BC) have been excavated so far. The first version of the GIS was developed between 1999 and 2000 and initially tested on an area of the Western necropolis. It consists of an alphanumeric descriptive database, developed using Microsoft Access 2000, linked to a cartographic section implemented with the MapInfo software. The paper concludes with a preliminary presentation of the update of the information system, which is going to migrate to an open-source software.

Pontecagnano is a large Etruscan-Samnite settlement located 8 km SE of Salerno, at the northern edge of the Sele plain. The well-investigated necropolis provided data that made it possible to analyse the structure of the ancient community and reconstruct its long-term development. Over the last few years, after archaeological investigations carried out during roadwork to widen the Salerno-Reggio Calabria highway, a more systematic study of the site was begun. The analysis of archaeological data was combined with environmental and landscape studies, shedding light on the reasons behind the spatial organisation of the settlement, which was influenced by natural or man-made landscape elements such as streams, non-uniform dislocation of geological formations, terraces, roads, canals, etc. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the methods and instruments we used to develop a system that can dynamically combine archaeological and geomorphological data. The paper focuses particularly on the reconstruction of paleo-topographical areas of the ancient settlement. Our investigation outlined the physical and environmental limits within which the old town developed, especially as regards the archaic and classical period. Part of the work was devoted to reconstructing in detail the connections between the modern and the ancient landscape, not only by reading and interpreting the aerial photographs from 1945 to the present-day, but also by analyzing the evidence from the excavations. This approach allowed us to draw up a detailed geomorphologic map of the area of the ancient settlement - part of the GIS platform - and develop a three-dimensional model of the ground (DEM).