Identifying the Roman road from Corduba to Emerita in the Puente Nuevo reservoir (Espiel-Córdoba/Spain)

Abstract

A stretch of the Roman road between Corduba and Emerita runs through the modern region of Alto Guadiato in the province of Córdoba (Spain). The structure of this Roman road is well known in the most mountainous part of this territory. However, there are four reservoirs along the course of this road in the flattest part of the region. Therefore, usually the Roman road is submerged and becomes hard to study it. In December 2017 we have been taken advantage of a drought period in order to document the road using remote sensing, photogrammetry and ground investigations. The first step of this research was the identification of this Roman road from several aerial imagery datasets of Spain available in the CNIG. Later, diverse DTM processed from the PNOA LiDAR point clouds were used to obtain the maximum of information in order to design our own photogrammetric acquisitions. Then, we have compared the performance of both photogrammetric DEMs. Finally, this dataset was checked with a ground survey along the Roman road.In this paper we present the earth observation, remote sensing and ground prospection methods that can be used to study a Roman road in an overall way. Moreover, these resources are very useful when agility is required to get high-quality documentation, as is the case of this submerged stretch of Roman road. Finally, these methods are also helpful to preserve the memory of threated archaeological sites.