Remote Sensing And Fieldwalking Survey To The Study Of Ancient Landscapes: An Integrated Approach

The Department of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Siena has been actively engaged in programmes of landscape archaeology for over thirty years. Territorial studies have been based for the most part on three methodologies of investigation, field survey in sample areas, field examination to assess the significance of individual monuments and analysis of vertical air photos combined with selective ground-truthing. The need to test new instruments and new approaches to surveying derives from a certain dissatisfaction with the results obtained through these traditional methods. The earlier work allowed us to identify a large number of new sites and to collect new data about known sites. But we still felt that we had not answered questions about our understanding of the complexity that characterizes ancient landscapes, ancient settlement patterns and their relationships to one another. In particular some specific chronological periods, such as the Early Middle Ages, and some specific historical questions, such as the change in the location of settlement from Roman villa to hillfort, remain particularly hard to confront. In our previous strategy there was too large a difference between the nature of the information obtained from surface collection and that derived from stratigraphical excavation. We clearly needed to develop our capacity to recover more detailed information without recourse to large-scale excavation. We therefore turned our attention, among other things, to the improvement of remote sensing techniques, while at the same time remaining aware of the limitations that this methodology is likely to encounter in a countryside like that of Tuscany.