Introduction
The rocky heights of the Hills have always been a place of inspiration for the passers-by. As the French archaeologist Émile Burnouf, one of the early admirers of the Hills, narrates in the mid-19th century: There, upon the highest areas of the hills the view reaches all the way to the sea and Piraeus, and extends further, to the surrounding mountaintops; the air roves about unhindered. The case study ATHENS WESTERN HILLS is an archaeological and historical perambulation of the Hills through valuable testimonies depicted on early maps of Athens. The Western Hills have been incorporated from the outset into the urban environment of Athens and have since been the focus of a variety of interventions, such as stone extraction, landscaping and afforestation, individual or collective appropriation, and visual arts.
Apart from the known antiquities, such as the Pnyx and the Philopappos monument, there is a vast archaeological reserve and a noteworthy, as well as inexhaustible, documentation material with regard to the long life of this place. The recording of cartographic and photographic evidence of the past is but one step towards highlighting and transmitting this material that sheds light on some of the most important aspects of history that may be known or occasionally unknown.
The map by Ernst Curtius and Johann August Kaupert (1878), which was the springboard for the present case study, is valuable on account of its diligent recording and annotation of the archaeological remains.
The use of GIS has enabled us to set up a meticulous “body” of data pertaining to various periods of time.
Aims
From an 1846 historical map showing location of different coal mining concessions with several The aim of the case study is to explore data on Cultural Heritage sites in the western hills of Athens, Greece in the context of QGIS, and export selected features based on cultural-related characteristics and/or spatial relations.
Level of Competence
Basic.
Skills to Be Learned
- Exploring QGIS project: Create QGIS project, explore QGIS project’s properties, save QGIS project
- Discovering GIS file formats: Vector & Raster
- Managing datasets: import datasets in QGIS project as layers, explore layers’ properties (Layer Name, Display Name, CRS, encoding), attribute table
- Querying: selection of CH objects based on their attributes and/or their location· Export selected objects as new shapefile
Workflow
Data
The data for the Greek case study are provided by Dipylon. The data used in this tutorial and results presented are only intended for simulation of GIS tool usage. There is absolutely no guarantee that data are valid and have high accuracy. Specifically, the following data are provided:
Vector
- Ancient_Remains.shp: Line dataset depicting the ancient remains in the west hills of Athens. The attributes of this dataset include a field (txt_Class) indicating the type of the remain in English and a field (txt_Cl_GR) indicating the type of the remain in Greek
- Ancient_Remains_Cisterns_points.shp: Point dataset depicting the ancient Cisterns in the west hills of Athens. The attributes of this dataset include a field (txt_Class) indicating the type in English and a field (txt_Cl_GR) indicating the type in Greek.
- walls.shp: A polygon dataset depicting the wall
Raster
- Kaupert_georef.tif: A georeferenced historic map of Athens, by Ernst Curtius and Johann August Kaupert (1878)
- VLSO_low.tif: A georeferenced aerial photo of Athens