Integrated Geophysical and Aerial Sensing Methods for Archaeology: A Case History in the Punic Site of Villamar (Sardinia, Italy)

Remote Sensing

Carlo Piga¹  Luca Piroddi¹  Elisa Pompianu⁴  Gaetano Ranieri¹  Stefano Stocco³  Antonio Trogu¹  Rosa Lasaponara²  Nicola Masini² 

[1] Department of Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering and Architecture (DICAAR), University of Cagliari, Via Marengo 2, 09123 Cagliari, Italy; E-Mails:Department of Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering and Architecture (DICAAR), University of Cagliari, Via Marengo 2, 09123 Cagliari, Italy;;Gamut S.r.l., 10128 Torino, Italy; E-Mail:;Department of History, Human and Training Sciences, University of Sassari, Viale Umberto 52, 07100 Sassari, Italy; E-Mail:

关键词: aerial remote sensing;    thermography;    night thermal gradient;    time series analyses;    thermal inertia;    GPR;    ground penetrating radar;    archaeology;    near-surface geophysics;    picture filtering;   

DOI  :  10.3390/rs61110986

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

In this paper, the authors present a recent integrated survey carried out on an archaeological urban site, generally free of buildings, except some temporary structures related to excavated areas where multi-chamber tombs were found. The two methods used to investigate this site were thermal infrared and ground penetrating radar (GPR). The thermography was carried out with the sensor mounted under a helium balloon simultaneously with a photographic camera. In order to have a synthetic view of the surface thermal behavior, a simplified version of the existing night thermal gradient algorithm was applied. By this approach, we have a wide extension of thermal maps due to the balloon oscillation, because we are able to compute the maps despite collecting few acquisition samples. By the integration of GPR and the thermal imaging, we can evaluate the depth of the thermal influence of possible archaeological targets, such as buried Punic tombs or walls belonging to the succeeding medieval buildings, which have been subsequently destroyed. The thermal anomalies present correspondences to the radar time slices obtained from 30 to 50 cm. Furthermore, by superimposing historical aerial pictures on the GPR and thermal imaging data, we can identify these anomalies as the foundations of the destroyed buildings.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.