GIS from a cultural heritage perspective: when past and future collide

Dissertação apresentada como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ciência e Sistemas de Informação Geográfica

Endangered cultural heritage is becoming nowadays a consequence of global change. With an increasing world population, urban growth seems to be a jeopardizing consequence for sustainable development coping with an already scarce number of resources and cultural resource management. This dissertation prompts the importance of pro-active monitoring of cultural heritage phenomena using Geographic Information Systems as tools for predicting ongoing change to take active measures in sustainable regional planning. The research carried out in this context will use GIS to analyse the case scenario of the Algarve as foci of urban growth as well as region of abundant archaeological vestiges from the Roman era. Understanding the dynamics of past civilization activity in what seem the most endangered freguesias (parishes) in the Algarve using Archaeological Predictive Models and assessing urbanity in those areas, may lead to a direct impact on future planning strategies. The choice of the Algarve for such study, relate to the availability of a large enough dataset of sites to create a predictive model of the Roman Algarve, as well as the significant regional importance of the region which historically has been used since the Phoenicians, up until now, where a massive tourist industry has led to a large urban sprawl in the last couple of decades endangering natural beauty of the environmental landscape.