The Roman Landscape
At Butrint, the Romanisation of the region led to a rearrangement of the hinterland, and the introduction of new systems of land division. The principal division used by Roman land surveyors was a ‘century’ (centuria), commonly a square of 20 by 20 actus (after the Augustan age, equivalent to 50.4 ha).
The fertile alluvial soils found within the valley south of the city would have been a valuable agricultural resource. Aerial photographs taken in 1943 show an intensive land-use history within the valley, revealing a complex network of field systems and land divisions that span over two millennia. Using these images, it has been possible to trace surviving remnants of the Roman land divisions or centuriation.
In accordance with Roman concepts of planning, the layout of urban areas and the organisation and division of the surrounding land was undertaken using a basic unit of measure, the actus, and followed a principal alignment. The layout of the Roman settlement on the Vrina Plain was planned in this way. The orientation of the settlement, determined by the alignment of principal streets (decumani and kardi), appears to relate to a roadway running along the axis or the valley from the southeast, forming the kardo maximus. This general alignment can be seen today by the position of surviving aqueduct piers close to the settlement, which are likely to have run parallel to the roadway.
Working from the position and orientation of the settlement, specially developed image processing routines have been used to detect linear features within the aerial photographs, which follow the same principal alignments of the settlement and which are spaced at distances divisible by actus derived units. These features are boundaries such as banks, track ways and roads separating individual ‘centuries’ – often providing access to individual land allotments. From these detected remnant landscape features, it has been possible to reconstruct patterns of centuriation within the Butrint hinterland.
A network of land-divisions measuring 20 by 20 actus were discovered, aligning with the street grid of the Vrina Plain settlement at the northwestern end of the valley, indicating that the division of the valley into 20 by 20 actus plots was broadly contemporary with the planning of the settlement. A similar organisation of the landscape has been found at the Augustan colony at Nicopolis in northern Greece where centuries of 20 x 40 actus were used.
The most prominent divisions detected run along the axis of the valley, surviving as track ways important for access along the valley. Fewer of the divisions running across the valley survive. Centuries are likely to have been further sub-divided into smaller plots, such as into four equal parts or into a series as strips. Southeast of the modern village of Vrina, several of these narrow field divisions, visible also in the aerial photographs, are still discernable within the current landscape, surviving as low denuded banks.
- Aqueduct piers
- Centuriation in the Pavllas Valley