Posters

Contemporary socio-economic pressure (including overexploitation and/or urbanisation of rural areas) and environmental processes (including climate change, coastal erosion etc) are determining the loss of cultural landscapes in Europe and all over the world.
Improved methodologies to study the processes that have shaped the landscapes over time are therefore crucial to understand and record the historical components of landscapes before these are irremediably lost or damaged, as well as to develop resilience and better define risk mitigation strategies.
Remote sensing is evidently one of the most appropriate and employed tools to tackle the challenge of systematically and rapidly identifying landscape features determined by anthropogenic processes and land engineering. While automated and semi automated procedures for feature extraction that allows for large swathe of landscapes to be simultaneously investigated are flourishing in many other fields, their application to archaeological and, more generally, cultural landscapes is still in its infancy – this limited development often determined by an uneasiness in surrendering the interpretation process to machine-based judgment.

This poster will illustrate an array of methods that are being used to automatically identify on remote sensing imagery landscape features and patterns determined by ancient Roman landscape engineering. Centuriation, the Roman system of land subdivision into large square plots assigned to settlers, continues to have a significant influence on present-day agrarian organisation in many locations across Europe and beyond.
A number of approaches in Pattern Recognition (PR) now offer the opportunity to adopt classification methods to identify potential land division elements based on the automatic learning of patterns and regularities in aerial and satellite imagery datasets. These approaches, which enable machine learning of patterns and the use of learned patterns for classification, can overcome the limitations of previous methods based on simple automated pattern matching and allow for recognising landscape patterns produced by a variety of diverse natural or artificial elements.
The poster will expand on some of the preliminary testing of this technique over the distinctively well preserved landscape surrounding the UNESCO Heritage site of Aquileia (Italy), one of the largest Roman land divisions in Italy.