The fourth‐ and fifth‐century aqueduct system of Constantinople is, at 426 km, the longest water supply line of the ancient world. Carbonate deposits i659ide an archive of both archaeological developments and palaeo‐environmental conditions during the depositional period. The 246‐km‐long aqueduct line from the fourth century used springs from a small aquifer, whereas a 180‐km‐long fifth‐century extension to the west tapped a larger aquifer. Although historical records testify at least 700 years of aqueduct activity, carbonate deposits in the aqueduct system display less than 27 years of operation. This implies that the entire system must have been cleaned of carbonate, presumably during regular campaigns. A 50‐km‐long double‐aqueduct section in the central part of the system may have been a costly but practical solution to allow repairs and cleaning of the aqueducts of carbonate to ascertain a continuous water supply to the city. The fifth‐century channel was commonly contaminated with clay, caused by the nature of the aqueduct system and possible local damage to the channel. This clay‐rich water could have been one of the reasons for the construction of large reservoirs in Constantinople.
16Despite the extensive archaeological surveys carried out in the last decades, little attention has been paid to 17 one of the longest water supply systems of ancient times -the Byzantine water infrastructure which fed
18Constantinople from the mid-late fourth century AD. This work uses modern satellite terrain data and
19Global Positioning System (GPS) data to assess this system and provide an improved description of its 20 route, total length and gradient profile. 44 validated GPS Control Points were correlated with ASTER 21 GDEM V2 digital satellite data and archaeological information in a Geographic Information System (GIS) 22 environment. We concluded that the total length of the water supply system was 426 km, and possibly even
29Keywords
Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) maps landscape with particular reference to its historic character and development. Executed using sources including satellite imagery and aerial photography and presented in a Geographic Information System (GIS), this offers a powerful insight into a landscape story. Here two leading advocates of the approach apply HLC for the first time to historic landscapes in the Eastern Mediterranean.
This paper uses GIS and visibility analysis to examine if Rubers Law fits into the known Roman communication and infrastructure network of towers, forts, camps and roadways in southern Scotland. Rubers Law is a prominent hill in the Scottish Borders with an extensive archaeological history, and the discovery of approximately 30 Roman building stones on the summit in the early 20th century led to the conclusion that it had been the site of a Roman signal station, despite a lack of concrete evidence for a Roman occupation. Visibility and intervisibility from the Roman towers was analysed using four types of viewshed analysis: regular, cumulative, fuzzy, and probable. The results were analysed to determine what would be visible from Rubers Law from a tower between 7m and 10m high. The various viewshed methods were also compared; it was determined that regular and cumulative viewsheds over predict visibility, while fuzzy and probable methods are more robust. Based on this analysis, a tower on Rubers Law could have been a major relay station, passing messages from Brownhart Law and Craik Cross Hill to Eildon Hill North and
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