3D Palaeogeographical Reconstruction of the Archaeological Site of Kition from the Late Bronze Age through to the Roman Period

Abstract

The ancient settlement of Kition lies below the modern city of Larnaca, on the southeast coast of Cyprus. It lies roughly 400 meters from the nearest coastline and has irrefutable evidence that it once had an operational harbour that had direct access to the sea and participated within the Mediterranean international trade system from the Late Bronze Age through to the Hellenistic and Roman Period. The following research has been aimed to hypothetically reconstruct a 3D model of the coastal topography and urban layout of the settlement, through the use of past coring data, sea-level indicators, and spatial interpolation techniques. The aim of this study is to manifest the contribution of integrated approaches such as GIS, Geomorphology, Sedimentology, Palaeontology, and DTM interpolation to recreate the Palaeogeography of ancient Kition during four historical periods of succession: Late Bronze Age, Iron Age, Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods. The basis of the topographic reconstruction relies on the effective use of generating a DTM through various interpolation techniques, taking into account known elevation points which come from previous coring studies from the Larnaca vicinity and offer paleoenvironmental information of the evolution of the coastal development. Corrections to the coring elevation points are applied based on local sea-level indicators, ensuring a more precise interpretation of the ancient sea-level. This study builds upon these previous findings and offers hypothetical terrain elevations of the various topographical features while placing basic 3D rendered architectural features onto their corresponding paleo-DTM.