Villa Verde, archaeologist drone with laser “super view” discovers a nuraghe

An archaeologist drone with a laser "super view" has identified, hidden in the dense vegetation, the remains of a nuraghe and two settlements of Bronze Age huts at the site of Bruncu 'e s'Omu in Villa Verde, an area mainly volcanic area occupied by numerous Nuragic sites during the Bronze and Iron Age (XVIII-VIII century BC).

The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Cagliari as part of the Nuraghe project , winner of the 2021 national call for access to the mobile laboratories of E-RIHS.it, the Italian node of the European research infrastructure for sciences. of heritage coordinated by Costanza Miliani, director of the Institute of Cultural Heritage Sciences of the National Research Council (Cnr-Ispc).

The super view of the drone, it is explained, "is given by the LiDAR technology (Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging), capable of penetrating inside the vegetation: filtering it appropriately with refined processing algorithms, allows to bring to light archaeological structures and topographical variations of unknown cultural interest or known only in part due to the difficulty in detecting them from the ground. This technology used on an aerial platform is opening up new research perspectives in past studies all over the world, from South America to Europe to Southeast Asia ”.

The LiDAR used by the drone "offers further opportunities, linked to greater spatial resolution and the possibility of making more surveys, both to improve the quality of information and to carry out any monitoring".

"The extraordinary and unexpected discovery - says Nicola Masini, scientific director of the investigations - highlights on the one hand the great potential of LiDAR on drones, which for the first time was applied in nuragic contexts, on the other hand it widens the area of investigation, asking new questions about the function and importance of the Bruncu 'e s'Omu site ".

(Unioneonline / D)