Air Photo Interpretation for Spatial Analysis of Heritage Agrarian Structures in Mediterranean Settings as Sea-Breezes Proxy-Data. Application to the Island of Mallorca

Abstract

Historical aerial photographs are valuable sources of climate information. In the present article, a reconstruction of the sea-breezes in Mallorca is described, based on wind-direction interpretation of threshing floors captured by the aerial photographs in 1956–1957 by the United States Army Map Service. These pre-industrial agricultural structures constitute a novel ethnographic proxy of cartographic wind direction at each site. The overall analysis of these directions has made it possible to recreate and model the spatial arrangement of the breezes in Mallorca, and to compare this recreation with that of the existing theoretical-experimental breeze models. The result is a relatively good fit between both recreations, which demonstrates the accuracy of the proposed method. This can be extrapolated to many other aerial-photographed Mediterranean regions prior to full mechanisation of the field.

Keywords

• aerial ethnography
• climate proxy
• sea-breeze cartography
• threshing-floor
• Mallorca
• agricultural heritage structures