On the Reuse of Multiscale LiDAR Data to Investigate the Resilience in the Late Medieval Time: the Case Study of Basilicata in South of Italy

Abstract

The Middle Ages have been traditionally considered a crisis period due to the demographic decrease and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe. Nevertheless, the historical reconsideration has been focused not only on decline and decay, but also on resilience and recovery which characterized the Europe of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. So, today the main open question is as follows: how can we explain the diverse attitude (namely recovery versus decline) and the reasons why some settlements were more (or less) resilient than others? To provide a contribution to this issue, we focused on two medieval villages which are located very close to each other (in the Basilicata Region Southern Italy) and selected because they are characterized by diverse vicissitudes: Irsi abandoned in the fourteenth century and Montepeloso (still “existing” and renamed Irsina) where the population of Irsi moved to. To improve our current knowledge on Irsi, we reused and integrated multiscale LiDAR datasets in order to cope with the lack of documentary source. The use of LiDAR data enabled (i) the reconstruction of the potential urban fabric of Irsi, along with its temporal development and the transformation of the surrounding landscape, and (ii) the definition of a hypothesis about the causes of its desertification based on the inter-site analysis between Irsi and Montepeloso. The main results from the LiDAR-based analysis were as follows: (i) the diachronic reconstruction of the building phases of the village and (ii) the identification of a significant indicator obtained as the ratio between the amount of cultivatable land (close to the settlement area) and the population to characterize the resilience behavior in hilly landscape. This approach has been also successfully applied to another similar case study. Outputs from our analyses pointed out that LiDAR data can fruitfully improve medieval archaeological investigations and facilitate knowledge improvement from intra to- inter-site scale analyses and from local up to a landscape perspective.