The impact of the roman agriculture on the territory of Savaria

Abstract

The first reconstruction of the centuriatio of Savaria was attempted by András Mócsy, who tried to draw itwith the utilization of mid-scale topographical maps. Since his publication there were no archaeological at-tempt in the last 40 years to prove his theory. In the last recent years we tried to continue the survey of theSavarian centuriatio’s existence with support of GIS methods. Fortunately, an interesting relationship wasnoted between the informations of some archaeological excavations and the aerial archaeological phenom-ena, thus, we were able to build a predictive model-network of the assumed centuriatio. The new grid totallydiffers from the previous reconstruction. The predictive model’s agglomeration of the assumed centuriatio-traces could be refined, and the refined model was controlled with the use of archaeological field survey andgeophysical survey as well. The new reconstruction resulted new opportunities in the interpretation of exca-vated sites or former known roman roads and aqueducts, discovered in the last decades. An other interestingrelationship could be found between the water courses that ran on the former territory of the colonia andthe roman field boundary system: the probable impact of the roman agriculture on the landscape that af-fected the “premodern” (prior to the modern stream regulations) watercourse system.