Integrated method to study the Late Antiquity and Mediaeval landscape along the Via Traiana Apulia stretch: dynamic route for a project of knowledge

This paper has the aim to show the research about the historical, architectonical and enivironmental context that offered to the view of those walking , between Late Antiquity and the beginning of the Mediaeval Period, in the Via Traiana between Herdonia and Egnathia. Via Traiana, whose lay-out has been largely lost, gives the oppurtunuty to study a settlements system with several housing, production, defense and cult functions, which, depending on the place and construction period, have different building and typological characteristics. All this architectural evidence, placed in the territory which is supposed it ran through, is variously composed: from the written sources and the place-name, up to the archaeological site and the building organism, from the rural up to the urban settlement type. The innovative aspect of the work, starting from the reorganization of the already acquired material, lies in the reassembly of the different architectural and archaeological themes, yet little studied, through the use of a geographic information system. The GIS is the tool that allows the great variety of heterogeneous data, coming from different scientific research contributions, to be put together in a dynamic, spatial and temporal sense. One contribution derives from the architectural and archaeological field investigations, making use of operational easy survey with the aid of technologies, such as celerimetric and GPS surveys, photogrammetry and operations of rendering, new elaboration and synthesis of recollected data by means of solid modeling and virtual reconstructions. And finally the digital video representation instrument supports and integrates all the other place knowledge tools, giving rise to a reciprocal enrichment, that is, collected data during the survey operations adjust and fuse with those of the video, those of the photography and with the historical news, producing “visions”, urging and provoking that imagination and emotional partecipation capacity which preludes to the project act. The extraordinary capacities using the GIS tool of this approach in recording, management and processing of heterogeneous data, coming from historical, architectural and environmental issues, with broad interdisciplinary content will be emphasized.