KNIR Column Rescuing our archaeological legacy
Anita Casarotto is a postdoctoral researcher of the Groningen Institute of Archaeology (GIA) at the University of Groningen. She works in the GIA/KNIR project The impact of Roman imperialism in the West: settlement dynamics and rural organization in Iron Age and Roman Portugal. Her research focuses on GIS computer modelling in landscape archaeology, cultural heritage management in spatial planning, Mediterranean and (pre-)Roman archaeology, legacy field survey data and settlement pattern analysis, open data and digital platforms for data sharing in the digital humanities. Her research activities and fieldwork projects (stratigraphic excavations and surface surveys) concentrate in Italy and the western Iberian Peninsula, especially in Portugal where she coordinates the Guarda Archaeological Project (GAP) in collaboration with the NOVA University Lisbon and the Municipality of Guarda.
As an associated researcher of the KNIR, Anita supports and promotes several archaeological education and research activities of the KNIR in Italy, in The Netherlands and in Portugal, serving as a bridge between the different backgrounds and networks of these countries. She organises the KNIR international, blended internship program Digital Field Survey Archaeology for (R)MA and PhD students, she is editor of the FOLD&R journal series of the Fasti Online Survey digital platform, she helps supervise archaeological digital projects and participates in the organisation of workshops on topics concerning landscape archaeology, field survey methodologies, topography, spatial analysis, heritage in archaeology, open data and digital methods in archaeological science.
Curriculum vitae
Anita holds a Master degree cum laude (2010) and the Scuola di Specializzazione degree cum laude (2013) in Archaeology from the University of Padova, and a PhD in Archaeology (2018) from Leiden University. She conducted her PhD in the framework of the LU/KNIR project Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization. Anita’s PhD thesis proposes a GIS procedure to interpret field survey data and connect them to different types of past settlement patterns and land use strategies for historical reconstruction. After the PhD in Leiden, she worked as an archaeologist in Italy for a commercial company and museum (Bostel di Rotzo protohistoric site, Vicenza); she was scholarship holder at Leiden University, KNIR and the University of Verona. For the academic year 2019-2020 Anita worked as adjunct professor at the University of Verona and taught digital methods in Prehistory and Early History. In the years 2020 and 2021 she was awarded the title of KNIR Fellow, and she was postdoc researcher at the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University.
