Roman land use and its impact on the Pannonian landscape

András Bödőcs

«Archeologia e Calcolatori» 2023, 34.1, 289-298; doi: 10.19282/ac.34.1.2023.31

Abstract

The Roman colony of Savaria was the first founded town in Pannonia (Colonia Claudia Savaria). Some inscriptions attest the so-called ‘deductio’, the settlement of veterans. After the first reconstruction of the centuriatio of Savaria no substantial archaeological attempt has been made in the last 40 years to verify the theory. In the last decade, research into the existence of the Savarian centuriatio has been pursued by using GIS methods, thanks to which we have managed to build a predictive model-network for the centuriatio, which is completely different from the previous reconstructions. The model has been continuously refined and validated by archaeological fieldwork and geophysical survey. The new reconstruction has led to new possibilities for interpreting the sites excavated in recent decades and the previously known Roman roads and aqueducts. Another interesting relationship between the watercourses running through the former colonia and the Roman centuriatio was also detected: the impact of Roman agriculture on the landscape transformation that has survived to the present day. Our pilot project, launched this year, plans to verify these effects using multispectral UAV surveys and geophysical measurements to show whether there were former streams along the presumed Roman channels that could provide evidence to support this hypothesis.

Figures

Preview