La evolución de la geodesia

The surveying, art and technique of measuring the land is an activity characteristically Roman. Although the practice of management and demarcation of the territories was not unknown to the Greeks and Egyptians and Babylonians, surveying not reach the level of discipline and practice of planning rather than the Roman republic and imperial times .

The archaeological study of the arrangement of the spaces of the rural territory of the archaic and classical Greece has revealed little evidence of a systematic practice of surveying. The Greeks fed the belief that their technical knowledge surveyor, as in so many other disciplines, had learned of the Egyptian civilization, but no Greek city-states tended to have large areas of arable land and arable land on which to apply the principles of surveying. The legacy of Egyptian reading lay rather in the geometry that would be used in geodetic calculations and calculations of Euclidean type surface. But in Greece also developed a complex system of regular division of territory mainly from axial and orthogonal outline instructed by Hippodamus of Miletus, but It used to be confined strictly to urban environments and rural areas. As such, the task of organizing and planning division of the city lay rather in architects in a specific figure how it is in the Roman world the surveyor.

These practices came to the Roman world through the sieve of Etruscan culture, which incorporated to this discipline important element as the outline of the basic design of the territorial division, the Decamanus Maximus and Kardo Maximus, oriented according to the situation of the cardinal point of East and West to South.

Although it can be seen in the work of Frontinus gromatica and the Constitutio Lumitium the awareness that Roman Etruscan surverying practice as spatial planning act closely linked to the haruspicina discipline. The Etruscan culture impregnated management activity and distribution of the territory of rituals and religious connotations that were kept on their way to Roman culture. Not in vain, the firsts Roman who played Surveyors roles were precisely the augurs.

The primitive relationship between surveying and ritual is probably at the basis of all worship the god terminus, sometimes also testified as Luppiter Terminalis, protector of the confines of the field boundaries, and festivities Terminalia, held on February 23. However, with the passage of time the activity was strengthening its practical character at the expense of its religious sense until this facet was diluted and disappear the surveyor discipline acquired importance in terms of spatial planning as a fundamental instrument of Roman social and economic policy.

The new Roman form of zoning extends a uniform model across the Romanized geography and complete the process of romanization of the territories annexed to the power of Rome, since the redistribution of territories trascends the topographic plane To achieve the administrative and jurisdictional plane.

The own grómaticos and historical texts recognize that practice of surveyor on the incorporated ground to Rome either by colonization or by consequence of a military victory had as purpose, rather than a reorganization of its geomorphological conditions, the formalization of a catastral survey with a political and administrative purpose .

The accuracy and demarcation of the territories involves the delimitation of the property, and therefore, the rights and obligations of the owner as well as the characterization of the full extent of land included in a division. The physical space is identified and characterized, and nothing is out of order implementing and establishing a primarily physical order but ultimately political, economic and social: The control over private property and heritage is thereby assured.

No wonder, therefore, recognize the importance of agricultural policy as a basic instrument of power since the time of the Gracchi, through rural development policy of Augustus and until the time of Trajan and Hadrian.

Surveying is transformed into a practice that is incorporated routinely to the Roman foreign policy and, thus

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