A GIS OF SARDINIA'S COASTAL DEFENSE SYSTEM (XVI – XVIII CENTURY)

Abstract. The use of GIS as a tool for archival, analysis and representation of geographic information has become significantly popular in many scientific fields that are directly concerned with the "territory" as their object of study. The field of application of GIS, however, has expanded also in other areas, such as those related to humanities and architecture, in which the territory is studied in an "indirect" mode because it constitutes a kind of substrate on which to develop a specific spatial analysis for particular purposes. Among these areas are to be included certainly archeology and restoration, fields in which the GIS has become a useful tool for historical studies. In this work we present a GIS developed for the study of the historical and territorial coastal defense system of Sardinia (16^th – 18^th century), in order to respond to the need to store, analyze and efficiently manage the information regarding cultural heritage and landscape heritage such as that consisting of the coastal defensive towers of Sardinia. This defensive system, in fact, was composed by over 100 towers positioned around the entire coastal perimeter of Sardinia, of which more than 90 still exist today. Their position was planned on the basis of the following criteria:
- Warning the neighboring towers about the sighting of enemy ships
- Protecting coasts located near the towns
- Monitoring the water sources near the coast
- Allowing for the full visibility of the coasts of any morphology
With this study we also verified, through the use of high resolution and high accuracy DTM (LiDAR) and the topographic databases, whether the positioning criteria specified in the design of the system were respected and effective.