Paesaggio catastale, paesaggio letterario e archeologia del paesaggio. Tre percezioni a confronto

Abstract

Our aim is to compare three possible and different perceptions of the agricultural landscape of Hellenistic and Roman Sicily: the "cadrastal" landscape as shown in the Tables of Halaisa, the literary landscape, as evidenced by sources as the poetry of Theocritus, and the landscape reconstructed through archaeological surveys (landscape archaeology). Each of these readings, with reference to the real territory of Halaisa, reveals itself as a different perception, mediated by the elements considered, the available data and the purpose of the approach: in the Tables the detection of the boundaries of public-owned lots, in the poetry of Theocritus the creation of an ideal landscape, connected, however, to a concrete reality, while the archaeology of landscape does not take a picture of the territory of Halaisa at a given moment in its history, but rather allows us to reconstruct a system of population, which is the result of complex interactions between human communities and the surrounding landscape. By comparing these three different perceptions, not in a combinatorial way, we groped a parallel analysis, which finds its legitimacy in the fact that in all three sources we found the same landscape components (networks of boundaries, road networks, the hydraulic network, the nodes of settlements and sanctuaries, the morphology of the territory, the relationships between them and the human activities). This approach allows us to use the archaeological data to reconstruct not only the relationship between human activities and resources, but to better understand the perceptive and symbolic aspects which link communities to the territory in which they live (social archeology of landscape), also using some potentialities of GIS, especially the analyses of visibility and intervisibility, which are very useful in this type of research.