Projekt Sarno-Becken

The geoarchaeological research project of the German Archaeological Institute of Berlin has a new website [Projekt Sarno-Becken http://www.dainst.org/index_7902_de.html]. The project is directed by Florian Seiler, and is a collaborative enterprise between the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei, the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici delle Province di Salerno e Avellino, l'Autorità di Bacino del Sarno and several university institutes. Its aims is to broaden the usual focus on Pompeii, by attempting to reconstruct the ancient cultural landscape of the Sarno River Basin.
At present the research group is composed of archaeologists, dendrocronologists, geologists and geographers from Germany and Italy and is working on the following detailed studies:
Spatial development and traffic routes;
The productivity of the villa rusticae;
Pedological analysis of Roman paleosoils;
The organisation of the local construction industry, including petrographical and archaeometrical analysis of all local building materials;
Reconstruction of the woodland ecosystem, based on the dendrocronological investigations in Longola-Poggiomarino and Herculaneum;

The work of the project includes also the generation of two completely new cartographical instruments: a georeferenced mosaic composition of all the aerial photographs taken above the Sarno River Basin during the Second World War (1943-45), and a digital elevation model of the A.D. 79 paleo-surface using stratigraphical drilling data and topographic indices.