LITMIR.BIZ

Figure 1.1. Reproduction of an ancient centuriation plan near Bologna, studied by the archaeologist Alfonso Rubbiani, from the 19th-century cartography in Albert Grenier’s Manuel d’archéologie gallo-romaine (Grenier 1934, p. 17)

This new documentation clearly showed the continued existence of ancient forms in the landscape. Concerning ancient planned plots in Campania, for example, the French archaeologist Albert Grenier indicated that the land “appeared to be” divided into square plots with a “very clear grid pattern”. He added that the most striking example was found in northern Italy (Figure 1.1) (Grenier 1934, p. 15). From the 19th century on, philological studies of texts relating to ancient surveying practices, whereby certain territories were divided along rectilinear lines intersecting at right angles into parcels or plots known as “limitations” or “centuriations” (centuriae),¹ were compared with material traces. Using cross-analysis of topographic maps, cadastral records, aerial photographs and field observations in Italy, France, North Africa, the Near East, etc., historians attempted to reconcile the material traces with the texts (Chouquer 2008a).

      1.1.2. Looking to the present to uncover the past: regressive history

      In countries bearing fewer marks of Roman occupation, many researchers focused on medieval agrarian landscape structures. In 1895, August Meitzen, a professor of statistics and economics at the University of Berlin, posited that a type of land division that he had observed on cadastral plans was, in fact, the imprint of legal land plots established in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (Meitzen 1895). Meitzen’s analytical method was widely disseminated, and historians began to pay increasing attention to cadastral plans as source materials. Inspired by Meitzen’s work, F.W. Maitland (1850–1906), professor of law at the University of Cambridge, began to study the origin of the grouped villages in the open field system and the dispersal of the English bocage. He stated: “Two little fragments of the original one-inch ordnance map will be more eloquent than would be many paragraphs of written discourse” (Maitland 1987, p. 16). Maitland’s work gave rise to a new tradition of research in historical topography in Great Britain, first based on map analysis, and later on aerial photography (Darby and Williams 2002, p.18).

      In France, the historian Marc Bloch (1886–1944), familiar with the work then coming out of Germany and Great Britain, formalized the “inverse method” in 1931. Bloch’s approach consisted of “reading history backwards” from texts and cartographic representations produced during the 18th century, a period in which landscapes and agrarian practices began to be better documented (Bloch 1988, p. 49). According to the historian Adriaan Verhulst, the regressive method consists of:

[Beginning with] the least unknown, which is usually also the most recent or closest to us, such as the present landscape or the nineteenth-century cadastral plan, in order to travel backwards into the past by means of clues which become increasingly difficult to interpret the further back we go, but which occur in a clear historical sequence. (Verhulst 1995, p. 20)²

Recent documentation is used for reasons of simple necessity, where no historical equivalent exists for the period in question. For urban historians, planimetric documents are the only practical source for obtaining ancient city plans, since it is impossible to excavate a whole town or city. For Marcel Poëte, one of the fathers of urban morphology in France (alongside Pierre Lavedan)³, there are clear and significant “medieval legacies” in the current layouts of major cities (Poëte 1924, p. 7). Ordnance maps, cadastral documents and modern plans are thus “perfectly acceptable” source documents for the study of medieval cities, and even for the ancient period (Lavedan 1926a, p. 94). Lavedan generalized these into “a principle, which, if not universal

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