- Field survey and mapping of the selected rural areas -

The implementation of systematic field surveys shall be preceded by preliminary works necessary for ensuring the higher profitability in obtaining data. In this way, it is essential for examination the available cartography in different scales and also the execution of methodical evaluation of the available air covers for the region. Furthermore, the areas to be studied must be surveyed in different seasons of the year, in order to minimize the impacts resulting from differential land use.

Performing systematic surveys in the selected areas to be studied in detail have as main objectives: The precise mapping the archaeological sites already known and surveyed for the region involved; Recognizing, identifying and mapping of other archaeological sites, which shall allow a better picture of the systematic occupation of the rural areas; Acknowledge and detailed mapping of the Roman and medieval roads in the region, in a view to achieve greater precision of the road networks, which may have possibly functioned as property boundaries; Acknowledge and mapping of the traces of the Roman cadaster, based on the alignments already detected by air photography and cartography, which can be found fossilized in different ways (fences, paths, hedges, markers or other types of limits); Identifying and mapping of the property boundaries, in particular, roads, irrigation and drainage canals, cippi and other demarcation monuments, related with the agrarian parceling; Identifying and mapping of the data collected from historical sources, a process that is closely linked to Task 7; Investigate the sites where diagnosis archaeological surveys may be carried out, either to date ancient fossil soils, either to achieve chronologies for equipment’s associated with the exploitation of the territory.