Redrawing Tarraco

The city of Tarragona houses an important architectural heritage mainly from its past as ‘Tarraco’, capital of the Roman province of Hispania Citerior, but also from its medieval and late 19th century history. The archaeological ensemble of Tarraco was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000, but although many efforts have been devoted by archaeologists and historians to unveil and understand the history and aspect of the Roman city, many aspects remain unknown. This is largely caused by the absence of a coherent body of historiographical material, which is todays cattered across several institutions and, specially, the lack of precise and useful graphical representations of the remains and of the existing city that allows in-depth analysis and interpretations of future findings. In recent years, researchers from the Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology (ICAC) and the Architecture School of the URV (ETSA) have teamed up to produce comprehensive, detailed graphic materials, including a new set of plans and sections of the old city, of the grandiose areas of representation of the Provincial capital, and of the hidden structures beneath the city’s surface. These have been executed with the latest technologies (fotogrammetry, laser scanning) but also with traditional methods (measurement, topography), on t op of a mixture of existing materials (hand-drafted cartography from municipal master plans) and of historical and archaeological documentation