| Popis: |
The area of today’s NW part of Croatia (Roman southern Pannonia) was crossed by the main road along the Drava valley corridor, known from Roman itineraries. Other directions that had to relate to it in the further road network to the south, are not mentioned, which certainly does not mean that they did not exist. From the Drava valley area the shortest connections to the southern lowland areas(Čazma-Ilova plateau), leads throughout Kalnik and Bilogora mountains, which connect but also separate these two lowland areas. The connecting aspect of these mountains is in the natural corridors that intersect them. It is assumed that the Romans, known for their practicality and development of road networks, spotted the potential of these natural corridors for linkage and use them as optimal for connection. Therefore, to determine these optimal corridors that could be used by Romans, we used a geographic information system as a tool, to map known Roman sites in the selected area, and interconnected them using least-cost path analysis. Further on, we compared these results with data provided by earlier researchers to single out the most potent routes that the Romans could use, thus predicting possible positions of material remains of roads in the future. |
