Archaeology and Geohistory: building a multi-user platform in the Brussels Capital Region
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 01/07/2016

For 5 years now the Brussels-Capital Region has been creating a geohistorical platform. A multitude of ancient maps have been georeferenced and vectorised, and projected together with the information coming from historical documents and various types of (archaeological) archives onto the actual cadaster within the cartography project of the Administration of Town Planning and Housing (www.mybrugis.irisnet.be), the Brussels region’s public cartographic site containing all urbanization information concerning the city. It constitutes the Inventory of the Archaeological Heritage, produced under the form of an Atlas of the Archaeological Potential within the Brussels Region. It is the legal base for the management of the archaeological heritage and the organization of preventive archaeology. The further developments of this web GIS will make the historical and archaeological information easily understandable and accessible to a larger public with the possibility of integrating e.g. research from university units. This process will lead to a larger understanding of the urbanization process of the city.
In addition to this 2D information, experimental 3D modelling was started based on integrated historical, archaeological and cartographical research. The test case presented is the house where the famous renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius lived. Today, disappeared from the urban landscape, this method has made it possible to localize it with precision and through the modelling of the images derived from ancient drawings give a better understanding of the architectural composition of the building.
The Brussels Region also holds a complete set of LIDAR images for the whole territory. The exploitation of these data has only just started and is extremely promising as they give extra information not only for the dense Sonian forest around the city but also for the city itself. Implementation of building archaeology data in the LIDAR model gives new perspectives on research on medieval building methods.
Hans Blanchart (Belgium)