Data Integration for a Hypothesis of Ancient Land Division in Eastern Irpinia: Preliminary Results

The research activities presented in this paper constitute a case study in Eastern Irpinia (Fig. 1) within the framework of the PRIN Project ‘Investigating Resilient Roman Agricultural Landscapes in Southern Italy’ (In.Res.Agri; Brancato et al. 2024, 392-393), identified due to the need for a deeper analysis of the data acquired during a previous research (Ditaranto 2013, 2016, 2022, and in press). The large amount of archaeological data collected during this extensive research had already, some years ago, directed specific interest toward the question of the existence of an agrarian division in the territory of Aeclanum (Ditaranto 2017), with some hypotheses also concerning the areas to the S – those related to the city of Compsa – and the sector surrounding the Sanctuary of Mefite in the Valle d’Ansanto. During the project, a program called the ‘Eastern Hirpinia Land Division’ was developed. Compared with the previous research, the geographical area was expanded to the hypothesized boundaries of the ancient settlements mentioned above, and the analysis was carried out using historical cartography, aerial photographs, and high-resolution satellite images. The interesting aspect of this research, and also the most challenging, is that we are dealing with a territory for which numerous sources (literary and epigraphic) document the occurrence of land division in the Roman era, yet no traces seem to have persisted, or they are difficult to recognize because of the geomorphological nature of the region, characterized only by limited patches of flat land. The overall examination of a dataset enriched with remote sensing documentation had multiple objectives: i) to verify the possible presence of traces and survivals throughout the studied territory in order to isolate portions of land that are actually indicative of having been subject to land division operations; ii) to identify traces related to centuriation limits through the analysis of high-resolution satellite images, the application of algorithms for automatic processing and to test the automated recognition of recurring modules in land division (see Di Palma, Merola in this volume); iii) to identify one or more modules of land division.