Following the Roman capture of Second Punic War, the general Scipio Africanus undertook a seven-day forced march in 209 BC with the objective of rapidly conquering the Barcid capital of Qart Hadasht. This military operation proved decisive for Roman victory in the war, the subsequent domination of the Iberian Peninsula, and the rise of Roman supremacy across the known world. Traditionally, scholars believed that the campaign began at the mouth of the Ebro River; however, archaeological evidence combined with GIS-based multi-criteria analysis of terrain data, palaeolandscapes, historical communication routes, cartographic sources, and archaeological records now suggests that the expedition instead originated at the mouth of the Júcar River (ancient Sucro). Using Dijkstra's algorithm, it has been possible to reconstruct the likely route followed by Scipio’s forces and to identify potential locations for their marching camps. This paper presents the GIS-based multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methodology employed in the study, based on a weighted linear combination designed to generate a final raster layer integrating mobility costs and low-cost candidate pixels. These data were subsequently used to calculate troop movements, forced-march itineraries, and possible camp locations through least-cost path (LCP) analysis implemented in QGIS. The preliminary results have enabled the reconstruction of the final forced march preceding the capture of Qart Hadasht and the identification of the last Roman encampment before the assault on the city. The methodology presented here demonstrates considerable potential for testing historical and archaeological hypotheses and could be readily adapted for applications in other scientific disciplines.
Perdiguero-Asensi et al. (Fri,) studied this question.