From the last decade of the 20th century onwards, the Roman military archaeology in Spain has assisted to a very revolution. The development of urban archaeology or the improvements of the traditional survey techniques were some of the advances which changed the discipline forever in the 90’s and the 2000’s. Now, the increasingly interest on aerial and satellite imagery have opened it to the contributions of a wider range of people, sometimes exceeding the traditional academic and specialized scopes.
In this way, if only 11 Roman military sites of early imperial times were attested in the northern regions of the Iberian Peninsula by 1990 now we can talk about almost one hundred. A great number of the most recent discoveries have been detected and studied by employing remote sensing techniques, that is, historical and modern aerial photography, satellite imagery, airborne LiDAR, photogrammetry… The combination of these tools with field surveying and GIS (Geographical Information Systems) allowed us to develop new low-cost methodologies especially effective when dealing with this kind of structures in almost every type of terrain. Our main aim now is to consolidate this research line, to explore its possibilities, try to reinforce it where it shows its weaknesses and to better understand the Roman military presence in these regions by adopting multidimensional perspectives.
Do you want to get into this little revolution?