From Historical Representation to Spatial Data InfrastructureFrom Historical Representation to Spatial Data Infrastructure: Contextualisation of the Underground Heritage Spaces in the City of Carmona (Seville)

Abstract

In the subsoil of the historical centres of many cities, there are traces that remain of various civilizations that previously inhabited them; when no traces can be found, these civilizations may fall into oblivion. This situation is aggravated when it comes to elements that were designed as underground from their origin. This is the case of the set of heritage underground structures of Roman origin in Carmona (Seville). The siting of these heritage objects, invisible to the naked eye in the contemporary city, is essential for the promotion of awareness thereof and of their safeguarding. The first step of the research in progress on the analysis of these structures was to carry out a review of the historical cartography on various scales, from the first representations of the city on a territorial and municipal scale to vector cartography, with the main objective of identifying and analyzing exclusively those representations that refer to and locate information on the city’s underground elements. With these elements, the second step consisted of creating the cartographic base of a specific geographic information system (GIS) for the identifi-cation and contextualisation of this type of heritage elements.