The dynamics of prehistoric burial mounds of Ploieşti metropolitan area (Romania) as reflected by cartographic documents of the 18th–20th centuries

Abstract

This paper draws attention to the unexploited potential of cartographic material related to Ploiesti city, Romania, from the oldest reports to the modern. The cartographic document may bring valuable, more often than not original, information in order to improve understandings of behavioural patterns and the evolution of prehistoric communities. The study of the distribution and dynamics of burial mounds (tumuli) associated with the Bronze Age, within the perimeter of Ploiesti city and its metropolitan area, is one of the first applications of this kind of analysis made in Romania, and succeeds in showing the importance of using direct or indirect data from this category of cartographic documents for archaeological studies. Moreover, it demonstrates that, because geosystems and social systems are not static in space and time, a diachronic cartographic study provides the opportunity for a phenomenological focus on the evolutional issues of tumuli – spatiality, boundaries, distances and density.