Le opere idrauliche nelle fonti documentarie: il caso di Veleia

The paper aims to highlight the role of a deep archival study among the different steps of an archaeological research. Nevertheless, the archival documentation could be affected by conditioning tendencies related to ideologies, technical and archaeological knowledge, measurement methods as well as to the events occurred to the archive after that it was ended, such as the splitting in several parts and locations. Due to these distinctive traits, a careful approach to the archival documents is required in order to obtain some correct and useful archaeological and topographical data. The case study of Veleia, a Roman hill - side settlement located in the western part of Emilia-Romagna, is particularly suitable to underline the potentiality and the awareness inborn to a proper approach to the archival documentation, thanks to the long history of its archaeological research, started in 1747 and still going on. In particular, the second part of the paper focuses on the branch of the sewer system close to the urban thermal building. This canal was drawn in different ways and itineraries in the documents produced during the centuries, so that the research this paper describe aimed to clearly define its shape and its route both by the archival study first and a verification through a direct inspection then.