CIPA 2003 XIX"' International Symposium, 30 September - 04 October, 2003, Antalya, Turkey 
Marchesato 
di Saluzzo 
Po 
Valley 
Figure 1 - Areas of investigation 
Piedmont 
Region 
During this period the Abbey of Staffarda and the monastery 
of Rifreddo were two important religious institutions, which 
had a strong control on the land and people in the whole Po 
Valley. The policy of these two ecclesiastic structures greatly 
affected the settlements dynamic and the environmental 
exploitation of the Po Valley natural resources. 
So we have been able to investigate and catalogued data not 
only about villages, church, castles and communications 
roads, but also about the land use, examining whether they 
were wild or cultivated and what kind of farming was used, 
hydrological networks and their exploitation, sites of 
transformation such as water mills and any kind of forges. 
The collection has been organized using a scheduled 
collection of key words and notes in order to allow an easy 
and affordable relational database implementation. Some of 
the used key words have been shared with other specialist in 
order to allow an easy merging of the data during spatial 
analysis. 
All the involved specialists defined together the standard 
analysis to be performed on the data during the recording into 
the database in order to underline incongruous information 
coming form the different approach. All misalignments of the 
data have been discussed and solved by means of the use of a 
metadata structure useful to define the quality of the inserted 
data. 
The database structure [Boccardo, 2002] of relationships was 
founded upon a triple core: each data related to a studied 
object is linked to: 
■ a geospatial reference 
■ dating (time and chronological dimension is very 
important in historical and archaeological studies) 
* source (documentary ones or recently published 
works, because they ensure the effective existence 
of the data). 
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Figure 2 -Data Iintroduction and quality control 
3. G.I.S. DESIGN 
One of the main topics of the G.I.S. is to share information 
between specialists in order to help the correct archaeological 
interpretation of the acquired data and, in the future, an 
efficient communication of the achieved results. 
In the following, some basic elaboration of the data are 
showed in order to demonstrate the usefulness of the G.I.S. 
approach in the documentation of cultural sites. 
The presented examples have been developed on the 
ARCGIS software by using the Visual Basic programming 
language for the realisation of the interfaces. 
3.1 Thematic map generation 
The possibility of creating thematic maps of the collected 
data is one of the most popular and helpful way to share 
information. All the specialists involved in the project 
defined some basic visualisation of the collected data. 
Figure 3 shows a thematic map of the geologic description of 
the Marchesato di Saluzzo useful in order to understand the 
possible location of the mines and quarries used in the past 
for the extraction of the stones (mainly used for buildings and 
roads) and of the metals (mainly used for coins, sword, etc.).