Archaeological remote sensing helps to identify ancient Rome’s military activities, campaigns and installations.

The history of aerial reconnaissance and photography for archaeology and past landscape studies has brought a lot of evidence on a continuous interest among scholars in mapping traces of ancient Roman military activities from the air. Both the pioneers of archaeological remote sensing and representatives of recent generations involved in this method of archaeological survey have almost continuously focused their effort to the discovery and documentation of buried and/or ruined remains of the Rome's frontier in Europe, north Africa and the Near East. At the same time traces of Roman campaigns into barbarian territories, indicated by temporary camps and other constructions, have been detected and identified. Roman military instal¬lations tended to reach vast dimensions, making the recording of their ground plans, landscape and other contexts practically impossible in any other manner. Without much exaggeration it can be claimed that archaeological remote sensing has played a decisive role in the knowledge and understanding of the system of Rome's fortified frontier, in tracing the directions taken by military contingents during the conquest of enemy territories and even in the estimation of the numbers of soldiers involved.

The contribution (in the PDF format) brings a summary of important projects and publications devoted to the subject. It is focused on three geographical areas – Near East/North Africa, United Kingdom and Central Europe (in the case of the last area greatest attention is paid to the more recent discoveries of archaeologically trace¬able evidence of Rome's military expansion on the central Danube, or more precisely the territory of former Czechoslovakia). Individual chapters arranged in this order simultaneously express the time sequence in which the aerial survey of military installations on Limes romanus proceeded.

Using the example of the above listed parts of Rome's frontier (Limes romanus), the contribution has summa¬rized the results by means of which aerial archaeological survey joined with photo documentation from above has enhanced the knowledge of military activities on this frontier and beyond. At present, con¬siderable opportunities for the study of this problem are offered by vertical aerial photographs (more¬over, easily accessible on the Internet portals) or satellite images. Unprecedented potential is also offered by the sophisticated methods, such as airborne laser scanning (so-called Lidar), by means of which it is pos¬sible to perfectly map the earth's surface including indiscernible relief forms of disappeared objects left in the landscape by the conquerors from the period of the Roman Empire. It can be expected that remote sensing will continue to enrich the archaeology of the Roman period to a considerable degree.

 Military activities on Rome’s frontier: The evidence of aerial archaeology (1.13 MB)
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