This report presents, for the first time, on-going multidisciplinary geoarchaeological work by a joint Belgo-Italian team from the universities of Ghent and Cassino in and around the Roman urban site of Ammaia in the northern Alentejo region of Portugal. The participation of the authors in the long-term scientific investigations of this site is the direct result of activities within the international COST G2-action of the European Commission. In this six-year action (1996–2001), which was titled Paysages Antiques et Structures Agraires, teams from over 12 countries joined efforts to study ancient landscape forms all over Europe. Delegates from two countries in this action, Portugal (Universities of Evora and Coimbra) and Belgium (Ghent University), decided to collaborate on the site of Ammaia and to develop this venture into a geoarchaeological case study to investigate the conditioning effects of landscape and landscape evolution on a Roman urban site (and vice versa) in the Iberian peninsula (Note 1).
In this contribution we wish to characterise and visualise the site and surrounding study area, briefly discuss the aims and approaches of the chosen geoarchaeological strategy and report on some major preliminary observations and results, obtained during three field campaigns in the summers of 2001, 2002 and 2004 (Note 2). These results relate primarily to three fields of archaeological concern with specific relevance to the landscape background: the tracing of the circuit wall of the Roman city, the intra-urban cartography and the supply of water to the urban area during Roman imperial times. We believe these investigations to be examples of good practice in the field of geoarchaeology of the classical Mediterranean landscape (Vermeulen and De Dapper 2000).
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