Distanze euclidee e superfici di costo in ambiente montano: applicazione di Grass e R a diversa scala in ambito trentino

The first archaeological spatial analyses were bidimensional and they didn’t take into account the environmental and morphological characteristics that might influence the length of paths or the spatial relationships between features. This approach is particularly misleading in a mountain environment where the difference in altitude between two points in the landscape is more constrictive than the “air distance”. Though the current technological means allow us to deal with these methodological issues, there are still a lot of studies that calculate the distance between two features as the simple minimum distance between two points. In this paper two archaeological case studies from Trentino province are proposed, in order to verify if the linear distances are so misleading in an Alpine environment, as previously suggested. The first one is a medium-scale case study (the whole Trentino), where the linear distances from locations have been compared with the least cost paths. The second one is a big-scale case study (Val di Fiemme), where the linear distances and the morphology- calibrated distances between upland pastoral sites (malghe) and upland lakes have been statistically evaluated. These two examples have confirmed that, in a mountain environment (and at regional scale), the interpretation of movements and spatial relationships in an “euclidean” framework is fundamentally incorrect. Therefore, they suggest that the cost-surface estimation of a sample area is an unavoidable step for the interpretation of mobility and settlement strategies in the Alps.