Articles by Amedeo Rossi

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).

The understanding and representation of spatial evolution over the time are at the core of two PhDs. These studies largely rely on the comparison of diverse inventories of the same territory from tax documents and maps: terriers and compoix. These documents provide a lot of information on the structure of rural and/or urban areas. However, comparing this kind of information, which was compiled in successive periods, is sometimes difficult, especially because of frequent absence of maps related to the registers. Thanks to ANR ModelEspace’s work, it is now possible to study these documents by exploiting their topological properties: information from textual and/or planimetric sources is modelled as a graph which permits a comparison in order to analyse the spatial dynamics of land over time. That is why this method for processing spatial data is applied to the territory of Blandy-les-Tours (77) and Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val (82) to observe land tenure, social and landscape dynamics.