Michele Abballe

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Archaeology

The “Bassa Romandiola” project was promoted by the University of Bologna and the “Centro di Studi sulla Romandiola Nord Occidentale” with the aim of investigating the north-western part of the Ravenna region (Italy), the so-called Bassa Romagna. In this paper, we present the synthesis of the results of the 2018 field campaign, which focused on the...

In this paper, we aim to present the results of interdisciplinary research focusing on the surroundings of Lugo, a town in the hinterland of Ravenna. The area is known for the extraordinary preservation of the centuriated field system, although its ‘Roman’ origin has been rightly questioned in the last three decades. Our data show how this seemingl...

In this paper we used archaeological and geological data and information from the written sources to understand how socio-ecological systems reacted to several ecological crises that occurred after the Roman period. The region investigated is the northwest hinterland of Ravenna, a sub-region known today as Bassa Romagna. Like other parts of the Po...

Three hand augering campaigns were carried out between 2018 and 2020 in the hinterland of Ravenna to gain new insights into the physical transformations that occurred in the area during the last 3000 years. Understanding these changes is crucial to be able to fully reconstruct past settlements patterns in alluvial landscapes, such as the lowlands a...

Despite several studies have already focused on the palaeogeographical reconstruction of the Po Delta, many questions remain unanswered. Indeed it is not easy to locate on the ground the few data known from ancient sources, while medieval and modern alluvial transformations hide previous landforms and fluvial traces. Starting from a reanalysis of e...

The Multi-Scale Relief Model (MSRM) is a novel algorithm developed for the visual interpretation of landforms. This was tested within the Romagna plain, the south-eastern part of the Po Valley (Italy), to establish whether it was able to detect fluvial ridges within this alluvial landscape. Since the MSRM is not the only method to carry out morphom...

Three hand augering campaigns were carried out between 2018 and 2020 in the hinterland of Ravenna, within the doctoral research of the executor, to gain new insights into the physical transformations that occurred in the last 3000 years. Based on known archaeological and geomorphological data, and historical sources available, six case studies were...

In this paper, I will present an approach to create digital elevation models of the palaeolandscape (palaeoDEMs) for a test area within the larger Romagna plain. The many landscape transformations that occurred in the area during the last few millennia greatly limit our archaeological knowledge and historical reconstruction of the human presence, s...

Nel contributo verranno presentati i risultati preliminari di un progetto di archeologia dei paesaggi avviato nel 2009 dal Dipartimento di Storia Culture Civiltà dell’Università di Bologna nel territorio dell’Unione dei Comuni della Bassa Romagna, la parte nord-occidentale della provincia di Ravenna. L’obiettivo dello studio era quello di valutare...

The paper presented here is an extraction of my MA dissertation and falls within the landscape project Bassa Romandiola. Considering the biases present in the dataset at disposal, predictive modelling has been chosen as a methodology potentially useful to gain more information about the medieval settlement patterns of the area. Both environmental a...