Many ways to look for a centuriation: RS images, computer vision and mathematics

There is not only one way to look for, find and validate a centurial system. During the current week Prof. John Peterson, from the School of Computing Sciences of the University of East Anglia, will be a guest of the VEiL project in Venice and will bring to the project his experience in identification and validation of ancient land divisions. An expert in computer-aided investigation of ancient cadastres, Prof. Peterson is one of the few scholars investigating mathematical approaches to the study of Roman centuriation and has dedicated his research to identify possible centurial system in England, never previously recognised.

Prof. Peterson will held a seminar on Thursday May 18th at the Dept. of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, 1st Floor Meeting room, at 2pm, organised by VEiL Project in collaboration with the KIIS lab. The seminar is titled "Computational models of Roman surveying"; an abstract is available below.

"Computational models of Roman surveying" by J. Peterson. Current knowledge of Roman roads and centuriations indicates that they could be well surveyed, with constant orientation and, for centuriations, high precision of linear measurement and accurate right angles. Therefore, models of some road segments may be represented by kml straight paths and models of centuriations, also represented as kml files, can be software-generated from Euclidean transformations of the local UTM grid. Recently published models of the Via Appia and the centuriation in the Pontine plain do not use this approach and do not appear to withstand close scrutiny. Appropriate metrology is crucially important for the study of these surveyed structures, but models should also be based on a secure foundation, using evidence on the ground, in aerial imagery, including Google Earth, and in the ancient land surveyors’ texts.