Seminar on Ancient Topography and Landscape Archaeology
The Ancient Topography and Landscape Archaeology Seminar Series for the 2025–26 academic year opens with a meeting dedicated to the themes of representing and analyzing ancient landscapes through textual, cartographic, and digital sources.
This first seminar of the 2025–26 academic year, organized by Rodolfo Brancato, will take place on Friday, November 7, 2025, at the Department of Humanities of the University of Naples Federico II (Via Nuova Marina 33, Naples). The event will include two lectures:
- Past places from document to data: introduction to historical gazetteers by Valeria Vitale (University of Sheffield), who will introduce the principles and methodologies behind historical gazetteers and the techniques of semantic annotation applied to geographic and documentary sources. The lecture will provide an overview of how semantic data enrichment enables the linking, querying, and dynamic visualization of spatial information related to the ancient world.
- Ancient maps: a short interdisciplinary history of texts and images by Anca Dan (CNRS – École Normale Supérieure, Paris), who will offer an interdisciplinary reflection on the evolution of ancient cartographic representations, exploring the relationship between texts and images to understand how ancient societies conceived and described space.
- Maps on mosaics: from Palestrina through Haidra to Madaba
also by Anca Dan, focusing on significant examples of mosaic maps and their symbolic and communicative meanings within ancient visual culture.
The meeting inaugurates a new seminar series devoted to studying the interactions between humans and the environment in antiquity, promoting an integrated approach that combines archaeology, history, and digital technologies.
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