Il contributo della cartografia storica per lo studio delle divisioni agrarie nella bassa valle del Potenza nel Piceno

This paper intends to deepen some aspects of the ancient land divisions in the lower Potenza Valley (in the modern province of Macerata), enlarging the geographical range in respect of what has been already presented by C. Corsi in «Agri centuriati», 5. Since 2000 the Valley of the river Potenza, which links the Apennines to the Adriatic sea in the region which was in Roman times identified as Picenum, has been investigated in the framework of an archaeo-topographical research project (the pvs), directed by F. Vermeulen on behalf of the Belgian University of Gent. The ager of Potentia, the Roman colony at the mouth of the river, has attracted since long the interest of several scholars and different land-division grids were identified. Here we will focus on what can be detected of ancient agrarian organizations thanks to the use of historical cadastres and aerial photography and their processing in a gis. In the appendix, by Dimitrij Mlekuž, some of these technical aspects of the gis analysis will be presented.