“The Whole is More than the Sum of its Parts”- Geospatial Data Integration, Visualisation and Analysis at the Roman Site of Ammaia (Marvão, Portugal)

In the last decade integrated non-destructive survey methods have offered new possibilities for the identification and recording of buried archaeological sites, whilst reducing to the minimum destructive intervention and the cost of investigating large archaeological sites. Using the Roman site of Ammaia (Marvão, Portugal) as a case study, this paper discusses the ways in which the informative potential of archaeological datasets derived via multi-method surveys can be best exploited through the use of computational methodologies. The first part of the paper offers a brief account of how GIS-based data integration, data fusion, 3D reconstruction and visualisation have been used until now to enrich the interpretation of archaeological datasets collected at Ammaia. The second part discusses in more detail the yet largely unexplored potential of urban network analysis to enhance the interpretation of ancient street networks revealed with non-destructive survey methods, as well as some of the problems involved in the interpretive process.