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December 1, 2022 • 18 mins

In this episode the spatial data associated with the 3 time periods under study (1463, 1700, and 1910) are discussed.

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Jen (00:00):
For drawings of land plot borders within Vostitsa, in
which the color turquoise alongwith characters signifies the
places in which the lands aredisposed by Beneprobatum or
Concessione.
Green signifies vineyards.
And red is for land, whichremains public, if rented
uncultivated.

(00:21):
Which can be seen withdistinction in the following
drawings of this cadaster, usingthe characters in the records,
which correspond to thecharacters notated in the
drawing.
This is from the VenetianCadaster of Vostitsa.
Published by Dokos andPanagopoulos in 1993, page 42.

(00:41):
I'm Jen Glaubius and this is theHelonaki deep dive, a podcast
about mapping and analysis forhistorical and archeological
research.
In this episode, I'll discussthe spatial data for Vostitsa in
the three time periods thatwe're looking at and also look
at other spatial data that willalso be used in the various

(01:03):
analyses yet to come.
Let's dive in.
The goals for this episode areto describe the spatial data
that's available for our threeperiods of analysis for
Vostitsa.
So 1463, 1700 and then 1910.
And then talk about anypotential issues about using

(01:27):
these data sets in general orwith each other.
The other goal is to brieflydiscuss other data that could be
incorporated.
So we're going to start with themiddle time period.
The 1700 Venetian cadastersbecause that is the most
detailed spatial data that wehave.

(01:48):
So the Venetian recordsthemselves included records of
how many trees of differentsorts and houses and things are
in each Villa, as I describedlast in the last episode.
But each Villa also included atleast one map that showed
individual plots of property,and then was linked to

(02:12):
information about how that landwas owned and how much land it
was.
And three measurement systems,four if it was a vineyard, And
the name of the owner itself.
So there's a ton of informationthat is there including spatial
information.
But this is a lot, a lot, a lotof information and to really,

(02:35):
truly use it means that each mapwould need to be digitized and
then georeferenced into itscorrect place.
So it would have been a giganticjigsaw puzzle.
That's really difficult.
And as something I was lookingat doing for my M.A.
Thesis when my advisor, JackDavis learned that there was a

(02:59):
map of the territory of VostitsaAlso dating to 1700.
So the same year as thecadastral records.
And this map is not located inVenice, like the rest of the
cadaster.
But instead is located in theKriegsarchiv in Vienna.
And this is because whileNapoleon was in charge, the

(03:21):
Austrian empire had taken overVenice as well as much of
Northern Italy.
And while there, they decided toscoop up some interesting maps.
And so that's why you have abunch of Venetian maps in
Austria.
Anyway.
So this map of Vostitsa islocated in Vienna and through my

(03:44):
advisor, I was able to getaccess to it and digitized it.
It shows all of the villas inthe Venetian cadaster.
So it shows that information inaddition to the Villa boundaries
it also shows locations ofdifferent places.
So most of the places that arementioned in the cadastral

(04:06):
records, plus some things thatare called like Paleocastro, so
old castle, things like that.
Some locations of bridges andthe rivers.
So it has a lot of information.
To use it properly it needs tobe geo-referenced into the
actual modern location.

(04:28):
So for my thesis, I had a hardtime doing this, but afterwards
I was able to place it.
So it fits on modern satelliteimagery.
And I redid this within thislast year, again, just to get it
a little more accurate.
But as you might expect for amap from 1700, it does not fit

(04:49):
exactly onto the moderncoastline, especially, and it's
difficult to match it up.
Exactly.
Because the landmarks formatching to the modern are
mostly villages and they kind offit, but doesn't exactly due to
the fact that we're trying tomatch up modern satellite

(05:09):
imagery with a map that wascreated by really good
cartographers from 1700 but whohad less information then we
have with satellite imagery.
So it doesn't quite fit.
But if it's pretty well.
And you can see an image on theHelonaki website.

(05:30):
If you want it to go look at it.
And from the map I was able todigitize all of the Villa
boundaries and all of the placelocations, because it will come
in useful.
I was also able to findboundaries for all of the
territories of the VenetianMorea.
There's a layer on Wikimediacommons the Regno de Morea.

(05:56):
SVG file.
Which was based on informationfrom the 1985 book population
and settlements in thePeloponnese 13th through 18th
centuries, which is byPanagiotopoulos, and it's from
page 165.
So I was able to modify modernareas of Greece and to fit the

(06:20):
Venetian territory boundaries.
And then fix, especially thearea for Vostitsa because that
didn't match up.
And I wanted it to match up withthe 1700 map of the territory of
Vostitsa And so I was able to dothat.
This is a lot of information.
We have information about thevillas.
We have polygons of the villas.

(06:42):
We have boundaries for the otherterritories.
So there can be comparisons fromterritory to territory, as much
information as there is forthat.
And we also have locations.
So.
Points for different placenames.
And you'll see why this isimportant for the next two time

(07:03):
periods.
So with that, let's talk aboutthe 1463 defter which if you
remember the records are fordifferent places.
Most of them are known villageswith a few that were places that

(07:26):
are called mezarra which wereuninhabited.
The work on this was done by theLiakopoulos who wrote the book
that I'm using as the source forthis information.
And he went through not justVostitsa, but all of the records
and tried to identify locationsfor each.

(07:49):
And so any one that he was ableto locate, there are coordinates
in a Greek system.
And so most of the locations inVostitsa are recorded.
So have been identified.
The ones that aren't are mostlythese mezzara, which there was
no other information aboutexactly where they were located.

(08:11):
And so there was land that wastaxed, but no people living
there.
And no village, no other toponymfor locating it.
So this is all good.
We have information that we cantie most of the locations for
Vostitsa.
So then that can match up withplace locations from the

(08:32):
Venetian records, at least.
So we do have information inthat way.
We can't go the other way.
We can't then put the pointlocations from the Ottoman
defter into the villas of theVenetian records from 1700.
Because they do not have thesame boundaries.

(08:54):
And this all goes back to theOttoman system for taxation.
It's based on a timar system.
So the idea was that it wasn'tthe land itself going to this
Ottoman official, but basicallya person, somewhat like a Knight
would be given the income fromthis land.

(09:16):
So that the timar himself wouldthen be able when called upon
would be able to equip himselfand others to go defend the
Ottoman state.
And so it's not necessarily landitself.
But tax revenue.

(09:37):
And because of that it does notcorrespond with the Venetian
territory of Vostitsa.
Instead, you've got locations,belonging to Vostitsa That would
later belong to Kalavryta.

(09:58):
The territory to the south ofVostitsa.
And the other way around aswell.
There are locations withinKalavryta.
Portion of the Ottoman defterthat are definitely within the
Venetian territory of Vostitsa.
And so it makes it reallydifficult in some ways.

(10:19):
You can't go one to the otherdirectly, but you have to
actually massage the data a bitand say, okay, well, this is
actually part ofVostitsa duringthis later period and so on and
so forth.
So it can be done, but it is notstraightforward in any way,
shape, or form.
Plus, there are locations thatwere not find-able.

(10:40):
Those toponyms those names ofthose places just did not exist.
Liakopoulos went through so manydifferent sources.
He Did a really excellent jobwith that.
Because he does such a greatjob, I'm able to include the
Ottoman defter in all theanalysis I will be doing.
But it's important to know thatit's not one-to-one directly

(11:04):
from the Ottoman defter to theVenetian records.
All right.
Let's turn now to the populationand agricultural censuses from
around 1910 from the modernGreek state.
Now because these are thenewest.
You would think that this wouldhave the best data?

(11:26):
And there is existing GIS datafor Greek administrative
districts.
Yes.
And it's available online andI've downloaded it.
However.
The system has undergonechanges, especially in the last
30, 40 years, they've changedthe system a couple of times.

(11:46):
And they do have the older data,but it does not especially match
up with the information in thosetwo censuses from around 1910.
So the easiest thing to doagain, was to use place names.
So record the point locationsthat correspond with places
named in those records.

(12:09):
And here's something I didn'tmention with the Ottoman
records, but it's true for bothof them.
Place names in both the Ottomandefter and in the 1910 censuses
are not necessarily the samenames that they have today.
Especially during the 20thcentury, many place names

(12:29):
changed to have either Byzantineor classical names.
So the best example is that thetown of Vostitsa became Aigio.
Which had last Vostitsa's nameduring the late Roman early
Byzantine period.
And after Greek independence,the name of the town was changed
back to Aigio.

(12:50):
So luckily there is a databaseon a website, which I'll include
the link in the show notes.
The website is for the Institutefor Neo Hellenic research and
the database is named changes ofsettlements in Greece.
And it's really, really good.
It helped a lot for matching up.
When I couldn't find a placementioned in those records or in

(13:14):
the Ottoman records.
I did a search in that database.
I was usually able to find it.
Some places I couldn't find thatway, but I also have an Atlas
from the 1950s and that got methe rest of the way.
It was super, super useful.
Because I have point locationsfor all three time periods.

(13:37):
That's going to be the primaryway that I actually compare and
analyze data from the three timeperiods.
So let's turn to other spatialdata that we have.
The one that I'm mostly going touse is a digital elevation
model.
It's a form of data.

(13:58):
We call a raster.
Where it covers the entire areawith little squares.
And the size of the square tellsus the resolution.
The larger, the square, the lessinformation you have about that
area.
The DEM I've been using is fromSRTM and it's about 30 meters,

(14:20):
but I just today found thatthere's a freely available DEM
that has a resolution of 25meters, which isn't that much
better.
It's only five meter difference,but it's a little bit better
resolution.
And so I'm going to see aboutpossibly using that 25 meter
DEM.
So elevation itself can beinformation, can be interesting

(14:43):
information.
That you can compare villagelocations.
Like what elevation are theyfound at?
Is there a difference there?
And we'll talk about that,especially with population,
because there's a theory aboutpopulations zones by time
period.
But the DEM can also be used tocreate other useful layers for

(15:05):
analysis.
We can look at the slope.
How steep is the landscape orgentle?
Throughout the area andespecially surrounding the
different locations.
Because that should correlatewith the types of crops.
You can also calculate aspect.
Which direction a piece of landis pointing is it north facing

(15:28):
east facing.
South facing west facing.
You have information about that,which would be informational.
You can do other types ofanalysis like to look at the
ruggedness of an area.
Just get some information aboutwhat the terrain is like.
We can look at other informationas well, as long as we can tie

(15:52):
it in to the spatial locations.
So with that, what we're goingto look at in the next episode
is start looking at the analysisby looking at those
environmental factors.
So thinking about the terrain.
And information about that forthe locations we have in all of
the three time periods.

(16:15):
For end notes.
The mapping program I use isQGIS, which is open source and
freely available.
It takes a little bit ofinformation to know how to use
it, but it's a super powerfulGIS software.
For the Ottoman records I'musing, of course, Liakopoulos'

(16:36):
2019 book, the early OttomanPeloponnese which translates all
of that information basicallyhas it into a table and gives
locations of all the places hewas able to identify, which is
great.
For the Venetian period, there'sDokos and Panagopoulos 1993, the

(16:57):
Venetian Cadaster of Vostitsa,while the records themselves are
in the Venetian dialect ofItalian, all the commentary is
in Greek.
For the modern Greek records,the Hellenic statistical service
has a great website and theirdigital library includes all of

(17:17):
the agricultural and populationcensuses that I'm using.
You can download, load them asPDFs.
They're not searchable PDFs, butthey're available and you can
download them and look at thisinformation.
Email questions or comments todeepdive@helenaki.com or ask
them on the Helonaki Deep DiveFacebook page.

(17:38):
Show notes with links toresources mentioned in this
episode will be available athelonaki.com.
That's H E L O N A K i.com.
You can also find ways tosupport the show now, including
merch, such as t-shirts, mugs,and stickers with the Helonaki
Deep Dive logo athelonaki.com/support.

(18:01):
My thanks to Patreon supportersat the geospatial analyst level,
Leah Varrell and Janice andJerry Farrell.
Your support keeps the Helonakideep dive going.
The Helonaki Deep Dive iswritten and produced by me, Jen
Glaubius of the Helonaki.
The theme music is Deep Ocean,instrumental by Dan o of dan o

(18:21):
songs.com, additional soundsfrom zap splat.com.
Thanks for listening.
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