Warscape biography: from historical air-photos to Lidar data. The revealing of the Great War’s permanences on the contemporary landscapes.

Abstract

Abstract One hundred years ago, the European landscape was radically transformed by a complex and articulated set of fortified works built in anticipation of the Great War and the “signs of destruction” inflicted on the territories by the conflict itself. These vestiges, recognized as “material goods having a value of civilization”, today are characterized by different degrees of permanence that make it very difficult to read and recognize them. In response to the awareness of the “risk of loss” of this tangible heritage, and consequently of our “possibility of memory”, this essay proposes a methodological path useful to face, at different scales, the theme of the recognition of what remains of the tangible impact that the Great War had on the European landscape, in order to understand better how to “take care of it” in the future. Inserting itself in the wake of the line of research already known as “Archaeology of the Great War”, the research carried out recognizes the heritage of vestiges, visible but also “submerged”, as a wide and “deep” information basin to be investigated and known through the diachronic comparison of different documentary sources and current territorial datasets. This method is based on the wide potential offered by GIS software. It aims to reconstruct the biography of the different warscapes by integrating the study of vintage military aerial photographs, properly geo-referenced, with the different uses and land cover, past and present, to precisely map the different degrees of impact the conflict has had on different territorial areas. Finally, in the areas with a higher Impact Factor, through the contribution of some specific visualizations of LIDAR (Sky-view Factor and Multihillshading Visualization), it was possible to reveal the actual permanence of the imprint of war still imprinted on the morphology of the contemporary landscape.