Are Roman Land Surveying Methods Possible in the Heracles Peninsula in Ancient Crimea?

Abstract

The topic of this paper is an organisation of land space in the Heracles peninsula. There’s a preserved unique monument of the ancient agrarian structure there: the land surveying of chora of Tauric Chersonesos in the Heracles peninsula. Within Soviet/Russian historiography there is tradition of study of the local land surveying of the hellenistic period. There is much less monuments from the Roman time on the chora of Chersonesos. The author of this article was an participant of MSU archaeological expeditions in Heraklea in the 1970s and 1980s. The purpose of this paper is an analysis of research studies that were devoted to the land surveying of Heraclea in the Roman period. In historiography, there is a practical approach to the issue of the Greek surveying ortogonality, without revealing its theoretical principles. The author of the paper expounds the Roman theory of spatial organisation and considers possibilities of its usage in the land surveying of Chersonesos. The method of the work is grounded on the author’s own translation of Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum and the reconstrustion of Roman orthogonality in land surveying — limitatio. The conclusions of the articles are based on theory and practice of Roman land surveying. Indeed, in the late Roman period, one used in provincial land surveying not only the orthogonal principles, but also sometimes simple methods which date back to the archaic period of Roman land surveying; they were applicable to defining of the borders of cattle farms and were based on the demarcation according to the features of terrains.