The ‘Cultural Heritage Map of Apulia’ project

The ‘Cultural Heritage Map of Apulia’, started in September 2007, is a mapping project carried out bythe Regional Department of Land Management (Apulia, Italy) in collaboration with the Regional Department for Cultural Heritage, the four Regional Universities of Apulia and the Regional Central Department for Cultural and Environmental Heritage. The project aim is to create a thematic cartography in order to archive, map and describe in detail the Cultural Heritage of the territory of Apulia, overcoming the traditional way of cataloguing based on a concept of Cultural Heritage as spots on a map. The other main purpose of the project is to analyse and describe the stratified historical landscapes of the regional countryside, from prehistory up to now, as long-term evidence of the identity of people and places. These aims are realized through the integration of different sciences and methodologies and a geo-database which is part of the Apulia Region G.I.S. organized in different themes and informative layers. This is intended to be an innovative and dynamic instrument of Cultural Heritage preservation and the accordance with the Cultural Heritage Map of Apulia is expected to be the necessary requirement for approving every land-lanning activity in order to preserve the local Cultural Heritage