My degree thesis ”Epigrafia e paesaggio. Il contesto epigrafico rurale della città di Dougga attraverso il materiale epigrafico” (Epigraphy and landscape: the epigraphic rural context of Dougga through its inscriptions), University of Trento, Accademic year 2004-2005, supervisor Prof. Mariette de Vos Raaijmakers, Prof. Anselmo Baroni, Dott. Arch. Redha Attoui.
The study is focused on the Latin inscriptions of the north African rural territory, which have been studied with a traditional approach; part of the research was also published on a WebGIS platform. The area involved is the High Tunisian Tell, 150 square kilometers surrounding the town of Dougga. From 1994 to 2000 survey around Dougga, was conducted by Trento University and the Institut National du Patrimoine of Tunis, directors Mariette de Vos and Mustafa Khanoussi. The Medjerda basin was chosen as survey area because of its fertility, (well known since ancient times), and because of the variety of its settlements: saltus, civitates. According to the evidence provided by pottery and coins, the area was inhabited starting from the 2nd century B.C. down to the 7th century A.D. The output of this remarkable survey was the identification of 545 sites, 186 of the 545 sites are farms; in 80 of them were found 134 inscriptions. The 324 inscriptions found during the survey are stored in a MS access database. For a better understanding of how our database was developed, it is important to point out the importance of the epigraphs: are not just an archaeological find, but also a remarkable historical document. Epigraphs are “extremely important for the definition of subjects, of family groups and communities living in a territory or in a circumscribed area. They are important to understand the social components” For a better management of this wealth of data we worked at it in two different phases. In the first one we inventoried the epigraphs, selecting different query fields in order to extrapolate as much detailed information as possible. The 324 inscriptions of our catalog, 263 are funerary, and thus give us precious information about the social status, the age and the origin of the dead. The predominance of funerary inscriptions greatly influenced the structure of our database, because we wanted to give the same relevance to the most interesting details about names, age and biometry. The inscriptions were cataloged according to several criteria.
The second phase consisted in positioning and outlining on a map the finding spot ot the inscriptions, as if they were mere objects. The survey was considered as a single main spatial dimension, in which the inscriptions are treated as objects inserted in the landscape, and also as objects that are part of the landscape itself. Quite often the primary context of an epigraph is unknown, but this was not a limit for the research since “when an epigraphic document is of doubtful provenance it is still important to try to understand if it had a bound with the context that is being studied”. Even if the inscription was originally located in another place, it is still an useful element for reconstructing a small scale geography, and also, indirectly, for reconstructing the ancient landscape. Once we created the data base we imported Autodesk Map through the relation Code block-code record.
