Articles by Tommaso Zoppi

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.