GIS and spatial statistics for cultural heritage assessment
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2020-08-27

The advancement of statistical tools applied to environmental sciences has been very fast over the last years; however, the same statistical tools were very rarely applied in the field of cultural heritage  assessment.  This  paper  aims  to  present  the  results  of  the  statistical  modelling  from  geography, using GIS, applied in the field of cultural heritage. Susceptibility maps of different natural hazards (landslides and gully erosion) are overlapped with the cultural heritage sites from an area located in the North-eastern part of Romania; the maps are made using various statistical models (frequency ratio, statistical index, analytic hierarchy process) from the availa-ble conditioning factors, and validated using the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves and the seed cell area index (SCAI) methods. Besides testing the predictive capability of the statistical models, our case studies highlighted the high potential of using the final susceptibility maps in the field of cultural heritage. Areas with high and very high susceptibility to natural hazards can be easily identified and related to the areas where the cultural heritage is located. In this way, recommendations can be made to the local authorities to analyse and propose mit-igation measures where very high susceptibility to certain natural hazards occurs. Other uses of the landslide and gully erosion susceptibility maps are environmental and cultural heritage protection, evaluation of the present state of cultural heritage sites, disaster risk reduction.


Ionut Cristi Nicu