Aerotopografia archeologica nelle valli del Meandro e del Kogamos: i casi di studio di Antiochia e Philadelphia (Turchia)

The paper is focused on the aero-topographic study of two important, but little known and investigated, cities located along the valleys of the rivers Meander (nowadays Büyük Menderes) and Kogamos (nowadays Derbent Çay or Alaşehir Çay): Antioch and Philadelphia, the former completely abandoned after the Byzantine era and the second characterized by an almost complete continuity of occupation until today. In recent years, the Institute of Heritage Science of the Italian National Research Council studied these two cities to define their ancient topography through topographic surveys and archaeological photo-interpretation of a rich multi-temporal dataset of high-resolution optical satellite images. This dataset includes space photos from 1970s taken by Hexagon KH-9 satellites, which constitute a fundamental historical documentation of the two sites, and various acquisitions made in last decade from various high-resolution satellites, such as WorldView-2, GeoEye-1 and Pléiades-1A/1B. In the case of Antioch, the research has made it possible to document some buildings of the Roman-imperial city, such as the stadium, and above all the Byzantine fortifications of the so-called acropolis. In the case of Philadelphia, since the historical remote sensing documentation shows a smaller extension of modern Alaşehir, which overlaps a large part of the ancient city, the research allowed to document both the territorial context and the remains of the Byzantine city walls.