Summary
Archaeological research on the Iron Age (8th - 2nd centuries BC) in the present-day territory of La Rioja (Spain) has been characterised by the fragmentation and scarcity of information, the lack of global projects for a comprehensive study of the period as well as the absence of studies that relate the sites to each other and to their surroundings. Moreover, the application of remote sensing and GIS tools has been rare to date, with only a few recent studies of Roman sites.In view of this situation, I contend that an approach from the perspective of Landscape Archaeology and the use of non-invasive tools and methods, including LiDAR, historical aerial photography, satellite images, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is promising to produce a broad-scale temporal and spatial interpretation of the social dynamics of this period. The final objective is to understand the transformations in the forms of occupation, production, and social relations over time from an extensive territorial scale and a long-term temporal perspective.For this session, I will present a first approach to such a project, that will constitute my future Ph.D. thesis. The work I will display at the conference will include showing how the use of non-invasive tools and methods, consisting of the application of LiDAR, historical aerial images, and satellite images, has been instrumental in the location of new Iron Age fortified sites (castros) and for better characterizing those that had been already catalogued. A comparison with similar sites already excavated south of the Iberian System (province of Soria) will allow proposing a probable chronological attribution, that will be verified with field surveys and the analysis of material culture found on the surface of the sites. Therefore, this paper will also show the results obtained from surveys in six of the new potential castros located using non-invasive methodologies. Through the use of open-source data and software, this study will illustrate the potential that non-invasive methodologies and GIS have for the reconstruction and modelling of past landscapes in this particular region, as well as the importance of Landscape Archaeology for the identification and interpretation of social and cultural patterns that are embedded in them.
Keywords
GIS. Landscape Archaeology. Iron Age. LiDAR. Non-invasive methodologies.