engleski

Felix Arba – reconstructing urban and rural economic capacities through GIS

In this paper archaeological data gathered through field survey and archival studies carried out on the island of Rab within two distinct projects will be analysed within GIS. With no history of systematic excavations the town of Rab is hard to analyse archaeologically, and all previous attempts suffer from the same pitfalls as very few new data has emerged over the years. On the other hand, its insular hinterland has yielded an array of rural sites which can be dated to Roman times and, some, even diachronically analysed. Nevertheless, as spatio-temporal problems within the data are present, in particular data related to the town, an analytical method which would compare the two datasets but still account for its discrepancies was needed. In an attempt to propose a model of the development of the town within the 1st millennium AD, we will try to compare its economic possibilities with that of its hinterland, trying to establish whether any connection or interdependencies are detectable. For this purpose aoristic analysis was applied to finds and features identified through survey, literature and archival studies, and taken as proxies for construction events, to overcame the lack of attributes such as precise spatio-temporal data, and make the most of the data recorded in GIS. On the one hand, possibilities of a complex GIS and spatial database will be explored, while trying to fill in the gaps present in our data set, on the other, a predictive method will be applied to historic data to test if any conclusion can be derived from imprecise and often biased data. The preliminary results obtained through aoristic analysis are presented as trend lines and maps, allowing both statistical interpretations and spatial analysis. Finally, this results are set in context and compared with models of the town's development proposed by previous scholarship and models proposed for other, nearby areas.

GIS ; Island of Rab ; Roman economy ;

Rad je nastao u sklopu projekta RED: Roman economy in Dalmatia Hrvatske zaklade za znanost (IP-11- 2013-3973)