289 GIS AND REMOTE SENSING FOR A PRELIMINARY ASSESSMENT OF THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE IN THE EBLAITE CHORA (SYRIA) 1. Introduction. The Ebla Chora Project Since the beginning of the Italian Archaeological Expedition in Syria (MAIS) in 1964 (Davico et al. 1965) and the unique discovery of 17,000 clay tablets from the archives of the Royal Palace G in 1975-1976 (Matthiae 1978), Tell Mardikh-Ebla stands as a crucial settlement in the history and the archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Most of the texts concerns adminis- trative practices and date to the Early Bronze IVA (Mardikh IIB1, 2400-2300 BC), when Ebla was the capital of a kingdom covering a large area of present day northern Syria. The discoveries from several excavations highlighted the role Ebla had in the large scale trade between Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, the Mediterranean and even further East with the discovery of raw lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan. The Ebla Chora Project (ECP), a 4-year program totally funded by the European Research Council (FP7-IDEAS no. 249394) recently provided the opportunity for a long term archaeological research of the area. The main goal of the project was to understand the functioning mechanism of an early state and the relations of a Bronze Age capital with its surrounding territory. Ebla Chora was conceived as a multidisciplinary project, where the archaeological data were combined with those from philology, geology, botany, agronomy, etc. in an attempt to consolidate and analyze comprehensively the mass of information collected in almost ffty years of archaeological campaigns. None- theless, the ECP occurred at the beginning of the Arab Spring in 2011, thus it was impacted by the civil war affecting Syria. Field activities planned over the four years were postponed and attention was diverted to the systematic study of the existent data acquired in previous decades. The outcome of these activities were published in a frst volume (Matthiae, Marchetti 2013). In the present article the attention focuses on the results hitherto achieved in the assessment of the archaeological landscape of the Eblaite chora. 2. Area of investigation (AOI) Tell Mardikh-Ebla is a 60 ha site located 55 km SW of Aleppo, about 400 m asl (Fig. 1). The project covers some 3500 km2 and it was designed to encompass the different ecological zones which shape this territory, as well as according to the regional archaeological surveys, either fnished or still in Archeologia e Calcolatori 26, 2015, 289-299 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Scientific Open-access Literature Archive and Repository