[Discov] Roman town of Altinum (modern Venice) rises again

**DAVIDE** · July 31, 2009, 07:03 AM

From the ground, a 100-hectare site just north of Italy's Venice airport looks like nothing more than rolling fields of corn and soybeans. But it's actually home to a buried Roman metropolis called Altinum, considered the precursor of ancient Venice. Now, using sophisticated aerial imagery, researchers have brought this city to life once again. Archaeologists have known for decades that Altinum, a Roman trading center that thrived between the 1st and 5th centuries C.E., lay below these farm fields. Raised 2 to 3 meters above the surrounding marshy lagoon by centuries of human habitation, the city was approximately the size of Pompeii. Its history could stretch back to the Bronze Age, and it dominated the region for at least 600 years before it became a part of the Roman Empire.
But all traces of Altinum's buildings have long since disappeared, either stolen as building material or swamped by rising water levels in the surrounding lagoon. So how to map a city with no visible ruins? In July 2007, during a severe drought, Paolo Mozzi, a geomorphologist at the University of Padua in Italy, and his team took aerial photos of the site in several wavelengths of visible light and in near-infrared, with a resolution of half a meter.
When the images were processed to tease out subtle variations in plant water stress, a buried metropolis emerged. The researchers discovered that the crops planted on the land were in different stages of ripening, thanks to differences in the amount of water in the soil. Lighter crops traced the outlines of buildings--including a basilica, an amphitheater, a forum, and what may have been temples--buried at least 40 centimeters below the surface. To the south of the city center runs a wide strip of riper crops. They were growing above what clearly used to be a canal, an indication that Venice's Roman forebears were already incorporating waterways into their urban fabric.
In fact, Altinum's end may have been Venice's beginning. The first century Roman historian Strabo mentions Altinum's importance: Its location near both heavily traveled sea routes and along roads running north to the edges of the Roman Empire made it a critical mercantile center. But as waves of barbarians invaded, Altinum was a ripe target. Finally, in the 7th century C.E., a Lombard invasion pushed the city's beleaguered residents onto the defensible islands of the Venice lagoon.
Altinum was eventually abandoned entirely. Most of the ancient city's stones were stolen in the Middle Ages to be reused elsewhere. Land-reclamation efforts in the 19th century turned the area from marsh into farm fields. "Altinum is unique because it was not built upon in later times," Mozzi says. Previous archaeological excavations have focused mainly on the city's necropolis, located outside the walls; this is the first-ever glimpse of the city's layout.
Local officials are enthusiastic about the study, which will be published in tomorrow's issue of Science. "Before what Professor Mozzi has done, it was impossible to imagine the complexity and distribution of the main buildings and structures of the municipium," Margherita Tirelli, inspector of the Archaeological Superintendence of Veneto and director of the National Archaeological Museum of Altinum, writes in an e-mail.
Mozzi and his team are planning further survey work, including scans of the area with a remote-sensing technology known as LIDAR, which will help create a higher-resolution topographic map of the site. The team also plans to sample soil at the site to see whether environmental conditions, such as flooding or drought, might have contributed to Altinum's abandonment. The images will help archaeologists pinpoint the best locations for future excavation, Tirelli says: "They will help us very, very much in our future work of conserving the ancient site of Altinum. At the moment, we have a lot of hopes and plans but no money."

Aerial images of the ancient city of Altinum (left) were processed by a team at the University of Padua to reveal the layout of a Roman trading center (right).

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi...09/730/1?rss=1

**DAVIDE** · July 31, 2009, 05:36 PM

Images reveal 'lost' Roman city

Aerial photographs have revealed the streetplan of a lost Roman city called Altinum, which some scholars regard as a forerunner of Venice.

The images reveal the remains of city walls, the street network, dwellings, theatres and other structures.
They also show a complex network of rivers and canals, revealing how the people mastered the marshy environment in what is now the lagoon of Venice.
Details of the research have been published in the journal Science.
Andrea Ninfo and colleagues from Padua University, Italy, made the first detailed reconstruction of the city's topography and environmental setting.
This was assembled using visible and near-infrared aerial photographs of the farmlands that currently cover the region, along with a computer model of the local terrain.
The photos were taken during a severe drought in 2007, which made it possible to pick up the presence of stones, bricks and other solid structures beneath the surface.
The authors note that Altinum is the only large Roman city in northern Italy - and one of the few in Europe - that has not been buried by medieval and modern cities.
The results show that the city was surrounded by rivers and canals, including a large canal that cut through the centre of Altinum, connecting it to the lagoon.
Two gates or bridges were built into the walls encircling the city, providing further evidence of how the city's residents adapted to their marshy surroundings.
The researchers were also able to see harbour structures at the edge of the lagoon.

Video inside here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8177529.stm

Seen from high overhead, markings in drought-stressed crops reveal an ancient urban landscape of streets, homes, and monuments in a 2007 aerial picture of the long-buried Roman city of Altinum near present-day Venice, Italy.

Such pictures have allowed scientists to create the first detailed map of the ancient port town, which until now had been known only from historical records and a few minor excavations.

The map shows that Altinum was thriving on the shores of what is now called the Laguna Veneta centuries before Venice and its famous canals, researchers report this week in the journal Science.

Dating back to at least the first century B.C., Altinum was a classic Roman city, the scientists say, replete with city walls and gates, a network of streets and canals, homes, monuments such as an amphitheater and a basilica, and a harbor.

A map based on aerial pictures, released in July 2009, shows the outlines of structures in the buried port city of Altinum.

The ancient Roman town was fronted by what is now called the Laguna Veneta, and a "brackish smell" likely filled the air, said study co-author Paolo Mozzi, a geomorphologist at the University of Padua in Italy. Summer would have been hot and muggy, while winter days would have often been foggy.

In Altinum's heyday "you can expect a lot of coming and going, a lot of ships arriving through the lagoon from points in the Adriatic, [and] there were merchants running along the Via Annia," a road that crossed the city, Mozzi said.

Aerial pictures of croplands taken in near-infrared light (left) help highlight the contrast between plants growing on top of structures such as walls and building foundations and those growing over canals long since filled in with sediment. Such images allowed researchers to map the extent and layout of Altinum's remains.

"If you look at it from the air, you see the geometry of these plants, which show underground the geometry of the structure," said Mozzi, co-author of the July 2009 study

Study leader Andrea Ninfo (right), of the University of Padua in Italy, conducts ground checks of data collected via aerial photographs of fields maize and soy that now cover the remains of the ancient Roman city of Altinum.

Altinum once thrived on the Italian mainland, whereas nearby Venice was built centuries later on islands in the Laguna Veneta, which is separated by barrier islands from the Adriatic Sea.

Although the two cities are miles apart, the study authors consider Altinum to have been an ancestor of Venice. People from the ancient port town likely colonized islands in the lagoon to escape invaders, proving the islands a safe haven and eventually giving rise to the famed Italian city.

Source:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...es/photo4.html