Vostitsa: Spatial Data

In this episode the spatial data associated with the 3 time periods under study (1463, 1700, and 1910) are discussed.

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For drawings of land plot borders within Vostitsa, in which the color turquoise along with characters signifies the places in which the lands are disposed by Beneprobatum or Concessione. Green signifies vineyards. And red is for land, which remains public, if rented uncultivated. Which can be seen with distinction in the following drawings of this cadaster, using the characters in the records, which correspond to the characters notated in the drawing. This is from the Venetian Cadaster of Vostitsa. Published by Dokos and Panagopoulos in 1993, page 42. I'm Jen Glaubius and this is the Helonaki deep dive, a podcast about mapping and analysis for historical and archeological research. In this episode, I'll discuss the spatial data for Vostitsa in the three time periods that we're looking at and also look at other spatial data that will also be used in the various analyses yet to come. Let's dive in. The goals for this episode are to describe the spatial data that's available for our three periods of analysis for Vostitsa. So 1463, 1700 and then 1910. And then talk about any potential issues about using these data sets in general or with each other. The other goal is to briefly discuss other data that could be incorporated. So we're going to start with the middle time period. The 1700 Venetian cadasters because that is the most detailed spatial data that we have. So the Venetian records themselves included records of how many trees of different sorts and houses and things are in each Villa, as I described last in the last episode. But each Villa also included at least one map that showed individual plots of property, and then was linked to information about how that land was owned and how much land it was. And three measurement systems, four if it was a vineyard, And the name of the owner itself. So there's a ton of information that is there including spatial information. But this is a lot, a lot, a lot of information and to really, truly use it means that each map would need to be digitized and then georeferenced into its correct place. So it would have been a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. That's really difficult. And as something I was looking at doing for my M.A. Thesis when my advisor, Jack Davis learned that there was a map of the territory of Vostitsa Also dating to 1700. So the same year as the cadastral records. And this map is not located in Venice, like the rest of the cadaster. But instead is located in the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna. And this is because while Napoleon was in charge, the Austrian empire had taken over Venice as well as much of Northern Italy. And while there, they decided to scoop up some interesting maps. And so that's why you have a bunch of Venetian maps in Austria. Anyway. So this map of Vostitsa is located in Vienna and through my advisor, I was able to get access to it and digitized it. It shows all of the villas in the Venetian cadaster. So it shows that information in addition to the Villa boundaries it also shows locations of different places. So most of the places that are mentioned in the cadastral records, plus some things that are called like Paleocastro, so old castle, things like that. Some locations of bridges and the rivers. So it has a lot of information. To use it properly it needs to be geo-referenced into the actual modern location. So for my thesis, I had a hard time doing this, but afterwards I was able to place it. So it fits on modern satellite imagery. And I redid this within this last year, again, just to get it a little more accurate. But as you might expect for a map from 1700, it does not fit exactly onto the modern coastline, especially, and it's difficult to match it up. Exactly. Because the landmarks for matching to the modern are mostly villages and they kind of fit, but doesn't exactly due to the fact that we're trying to match up modern satellite imagery with a map that was created by really good cartographers from 1700 but who had less information then we have with satellite imagery. So it doesn't quite fit. But if it's pretty well. And you can see an image on the Helonaki website. If you want it to go look at it. And from the map I was able to digitize all of the Villa boundaries and all of the place locations, because it will come in useful. I was also able to find boundaries for all of the territories of the Venetian Morea. There's a layer on Wikimedia commons the Regno de Morea. SVG file. Which was based on information from the 1985 book population and settlements in the Peloponnese 13th through 18th centuries, which is by Panagiotopoulos, and it's from page 165. So I was able to modify modern areas of Greece and to fit the Venetian territory boundaries. And then fix, especially the area for Vostitsa because that didn't match up. And I wanted it to match up with the 1700 map of the territory of Vostitsa And so I was able to do that. This is a lot of information. We have information about the villas. We have polygons of the villas. We have boundaries for the other territories. So there can be comparisons from territory to territory, as much information as there is for that. And we also have locations. So. Points for different place names. And you'll see why this is important for the next two time periods. So with that, let's talk about the 1463 defter which if you remember the records are for different places. Most of them are known villages with a few that were places that are called mezarra which were uninhabited. The work on this was done by the Liakopoulos who wrote the book that I'm using as the source for this information. And he went through not just Vostitsa, but all of the records and tried to identify locations for each. And so any one that he was able to locate, there are coordinates in a Greek system. And so most of the locations in Vostitsa are recorded. So have been identified. The ones that aren't are mostly these mezzara, which there was no other information about exactly where they were located. And so there was land that was taxed, but no people living there. And no village, no other toponym for locating it. So this is all good. We have information that we can tie most of the locations for Vostitsa. So then that can match up with place locations from the Venetian records, at least. So we do have information in that way. We can't go the other way. We can't then put the point locations from the Ottoman defter into the villas of the Venetian records from 1700. Because they do not have the same boundaries. And this all goes back to the Ottoman system for taxation. It's based on a timar system. So the idea was that it wasn't the land itself going to this Ottoman official, but basically a person, somewhat like a Knight would be given the income from this land. So that the timar himself would then be able when called upon would be able to equip himself and others to go defend the Ottoman state. And so it's not necessarily land itself. But tax revenue. And because of that it does not correspond with the Venetian territory of Vostitsa. Instead, you've got locations, belonging to Vostitsa That would later belong to Kalavryta. The territory to the south of Vostitsa. And the other way around as well. There are locations within Kalavryta. Portion of the Ottoman defter that are definitely within the Venetian territory of Vostitsa. And so it makes it really difficult in some ways. You can't go one to the other directly, but you have to actually massage the data a bit and say, okay, well, this is actually part ofVostitsa during this later period and so on and so forth. So it can be done, but it is not straightforward in any way, shape, or form. Plus, there are locations that were not find-able. Those toponyms those names of those places just did not exist. Liakopoulos went through so many different sources. He Did a really excellent job with that. Because he does such a great job, I'm able to include the Ottoman defter in all the analysis I will be doing. But it's important to know that it's not one-to-one directly from the Ottoman defter to the Venetian records. All right. Let's turn now to the population and agricultural censuses from around 1910 from the modern Greek state. Now because these are the newest. You would think that this would have the best data? And there is existing GIS data for Greek administrative districts. Yes. And it's available online and I've downloaded it. However. The system has undergone changes, especially in the last 30, 40 years, they've changed the system a couple of times. And they do have the older data, but it does not especially match up with the information in those two censuses from around 1910. So the easiest thing to do again, was to use place names. So record the point locations that correspond with places named in those records. And here's something I didn't mention with the Ottoman records, but it's true for both of them. Place names in both the Ottoman defter and in the 1910 censuses are not necessarily the same names that they have today. Especially during the 20th century, many place names changed to have either Byzantine or classical names. So the best example is that the town of Vostitsa became Aigio. Which had last Vostitsa's name during the late Roman early Byzantine period. And after Greek independence, the name of the town was changed back to Aigio. So luckily there is a database on a website, which I'll include the link in the show notes. The website is for the Institute for Neo Hellenic research and the database is named changes of settlements in Greece. And it's really, really good. It helped a lot for matching up. When I couldn't find a place mentioned in those records or in the Ottoman records. I did a search in that database. I was usually able to find it. Some places I couldn't find that way, but I also have an Atlas from the 1950s and that got me the rest of the way. It was super, super useful. Because I have point locations for all three time periods. That's going to be the primary way that I actually compare and analyze data from the three time periods. So let's turn to other spatial data that we have. The one that I'm mostly going to use is a digital elevation model. It's a form of data. We call a raster. Where it covers the entire area with little squares. And the size of the square tells us the resolution. The larger, the square, the less information you have about that area. The DEM I've been using is from SRTM and it's about 30 meters, but I just today found that there's a freely available DEM that has a resolution of 25 meters, which isn't that much better. It's only five meter difference, but it's a little bit better resolution. And so I'm going to see about possibly using that 25 meter DEM. So elevation itself can be information, can be interesting information. That you can compare village locations. Like what elevation are they found at? Is there a difference there? And we'll talk about that, especially with population, because there's a theory about populations zones by time period. But the DEM can also be used to create other useful layers for analysis. We can look at the slope. How steep is the landscape or gentle? Throughout the area and especially surrounding the different locations. Because that should correlate with the types of crops. You can also calculate aspect. Which direction a piece of land is pointing is it north facing east facing. South facing west facing. You have information about that, which would be informational. You can do other types of analysis like to look at the ruggedness of an area. Just get some information about what the terrain is like. We can look at other information as well, as long as we can tie it in to the spatial locations. So with that, what we're going to look at in the next episode is start looking at the analysis by looking at those environmental factors. So thinking about the terrain. And information about that for the locations we have in all of the three time periods. For end notes. The mapping program I use is QGIS, which is open source and freely available. It takes a little bit of information to know how to use it, but it's a super powerful GIS software. For the Ottoman records I'm using, of course, Liakopoulos' 2019 book, the early Ottoman Peloponnese which translates all of that information basically has it into a table and gives locations of all the places he was able to identify, which is great. For the Venetian period, there's Dokos and Panagopoulos 1993, the Venetian Cadaster of Vostitsa, while the records themselves are in the Venetian dialect of Italian, all the commentary is in Greek. For the modern Greek records, the Hellenic statistical service has a great website and their digital library includes all of the agricultural and population censuses that I'm using. You can download, load them as PDFs. They're not searchable PDFs, but they're available and you can download them and look at this information. Email questions or comments to deepdive@helenaki.com or ask them on the Helonaki Deep Dive Facebook page. Show notes with links to resources mentioned in this episode will be available at helonaki.com. That's H E L O N A K i.com. You can also find ways to support the show now, including merch, such as t-shirts, mugs, and stickers with the Helonaki Deep Dive logo at helonaki.com/support. My thanks to Patreon supporters at the geospatial analyst level, Leah Varrell and Janice and Jerry Farrell. Your support keeps the Helonaki deep dive going. The Helonaki Deep Dive is written and produced by me, Jen Glaubius of the Helonaki. The theme music is Deep Ocean, instrumental by Dan o of dan o songs.com, additional sounds from zap splat.com. Thanks for listening.