Shaping a juridical district: a postdictive approach

Carlo Citter, Ylenia Paciotti

«Archeologia e Calcolatori» 2023, 34.1, 321-328; doi: 10.19282/ac.34.1.2023.34

Abstract

How can we study the making of a medieval juridical space? Which were the agents that affected more? We try to answer to these questions thanks to a postdictive approach. We applied the QGIS algorithms to model the potential political space. We used several agents to get different outcomes. We tried both environmental and human agents to avoid the more deterministic side of this approach. We focused on the plain of Lucca in Northern Tuscany to study the making and development of its bishopric. Then we turned to the southern side of this region to study the district of a castle already excavated and whose territory is known quite well: Selvena. In this last example, we applied a regressive procedure, starting from the 19th century communities boundaries and making hypotheses about the relationship with medieval districts. This procedure can be applied to any context where a certain amount of data is available.

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