Reconstruct Terrain 2000 years ago - possible with GIS?

[Legiones]

Hey Guys,
I have a question about Digital Terrain models and modeling a roman fight 2000 years ago with it.
Its a student research project, so it would be nice if I find a way to do this;)

Now my question:
Is it possible to reconstruct the terrain 2000 years ago in a GI-System? The march and the fight of this Roman commander took about
100km and 4 days, so its a huge terrain to research. 2000 years ago most of the terrain was wooded, nowadays there is not much forest and a lot of villages.

So my aim is to find a possible route which he took, some of the camps they had during the march or an ambush for the romans.

Is it senseless to try to reconstruct the terrain because it had not changed a lot? Did only the landuse change?
Or do you know a way how to estimate it with a GI-System? (I thought about flowaccumulation or sth like that)

Would be nice of some of u have an idea;)

Thanks a lot

and sorry for my english..

[spazzle]

Hi Legiones
 
That should not be a problem as long as you have access to some terrain data.
Check here, there may be other sources mentioned on this site
 

https://dragons8mycat.wordpress.com/gis-data-sources/

 
The exact methods vary and are too detailed to go into in a blog, there are several ways
to achieve what you want
 
You could set up a simple network and use a gravity model (or least cost path distance model)

to declare the:
 
Slope gradients
Wooded restrictions (you would have to guestimate this based on historic data)
River restrictions
Terrain restrictions
Existing roads and paths at the that time
How far person can work in a day with full provisions
Pace of walking with full provisions (British army site may have data
related to this, or a Hiking site covers uphill, downhill and on the flat
terrain) Etc
 
Turn this into a grid and use some spatial maths, there is a free program
from "Flowmap" and manuals from holland uni that does this sort of thing,
 

http://flowmap.geo.uu.nl/index.php

 
also Idrisi can handle some of this stuff then display in program of choice.

(Or use some Multi Criteria approach you can weight all the possibilities)
Try out a few different routes ect. this should help you to decide on the most likely

route the romans took.
 

Or you could try something along the lines of what is shown in this post, obviously

substitute/replace contamination path and use your data for the marching path

 

http://www.gisarea.com/topic/1551-cost-and-weighted-shortest-path-path-of-a-contaminant-with-arcgis/

 

Other software can help you visualise the scene, check out darksabersan's post
 
http://www.gisarea.com/topic/5176-lumenrt-geodesign-2015/
 
Best of luck

Edited February 27, 2015 by spazzle