The archaeological site of Torre Santa Sabina is to the north of Brindisi along the Adriatic coast of Apulia, not far from the ancient Karbinia, the modern Carovigno. It is well known because of the continuous human presence from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages, through Mycenaean and Roman times. It was named ad speluncas during Roman times; when little villages-mansions-were placed along the main roads playing an important role as logistical stations between the main cities. Numerous archaeological structures have been found in the coastal area of the mansio ad speluncas. They are land indicators or sea indicators since they only indicate that sea level was lower or higher than present at the time of their building. The most important sea level indicators are two wrecks of Roman ships ascribed to the Late Republic or Ist century of the Imperial Age. Beached at the mean depth of 2.5m b.p.s.l. sea level, they could indicate the position of the sea level at the time of their abandonment on the beach. The archaeological remains suggest that about 3300 years ago the sea level stood up to 3m below the present one; 2200 years it raised up to 2.5m lower than the present one as also indicated by data coming from the near harbour of Egnatia. The following rise of the sea level has been responsible for the flooding of medieval structures.
The coast ot Apulia includes a number of stretches of coastal cliffs which, due to their geo-structural character and the relentless wave action of the sea, reveal clear phenomena of mass movement. The cliffs of Porto Miggiano (south-est Apulia) are considered in this work their conditions of stability are evaluated in relation to the geo-mechanical characteristics of the rock outcrops and to the effective state of mass movement found. The stratigraphic sequence of the area is formed by a paleocenic carbonatic basement known as the Formation of Castro Limestone, on which in transgression calcarenitic rocks are found known in the literatures as «Calcarenites of Salento», A detailed study of the calcarenitic lithofacies has made it possible to sub divide the calcarenitic formation into two parts. The lower, oft Calabrian origin, is formed by calcarenites in which intercalations of marly-clayey silts are present towars the top. The upper part, of tyrrhenian origin, is formed by cross bedded calcarenites which rest on silts below with marked angular discordance. The analysis of the tectonic and geo-structural character of the area made it possible to hypothesize the presence of two direct faults running respectively NW-SE an d NNE-SSW, which can be traced to Plio-quaternary neo-tectonics, and also to define the geometry of the discontinuity families which affect the rock mass. The determination of the physical parameters of the pleistocenic calcarenites allows some hypotheses to be made about the environment of formation of the silty partss; while, in agreement with what emerges from the geo-physical survey, the parameters ot mechanical resistence obtained show the poor quality of the rock. The state of mass movement found on the stretch of coast studied is almost exelusively confined to the tyrrhenian calcarenites and is due to the mobilization phenomena of falls toppling, breaks along newly formed shear planes and sliding of wedges. The verification ot sliding and toppling stability carried out with the graphic methods proposed by J.T. Markland, E. Hoek & J.W. Bray, and R.E. Goodman, have given safety factor levels generally below the limit value of Fs = 1, thus confirming the correspondence between the instability deduced from the calculation and that actually found in situ. Finally, the comparison of the safety factors obtained shows the substantial equivalence between the verification methods employed.
Notizia preliminare degli scavi archeologici condotti a Castro nella località Capanne, dove sono stati riportati alla luce quartieri di abitazione di età medievale e moderna e strutture di fortificazione risalenti ad epoca messapica.
Jacopo Bonetto, Presentazione. Marco Edoardo Minoja, Presentazione. Anna Gutiérrez Garcia M., Premessa. Introduzione. 1. Le cave di pietra della Sardegna: storia degli studi. 2. Archeologia dell'edilizia a Nora. Storia degli studi sulle cave e sull'uso della pietra. 3. Nora e il suo territorio: inquadramento geologico. 4. Le cave di Nora e del suo territorio. 5. Le cave del territorio di Nora: considerazioni di sintesi 6. lo sfruttamento delle cave e l'uso della pietra a Nora dall'VIII secolo a.C. all'età tardoantica. 7. Atlante dei materiali lapidei del territorio di Nora. Bibliografia generale.
Along the Ionian coast of southern Apulia many ancient quarries have been identified. In most cases, stone materials were extracted in ancient times from calcarenite outcrops to be used for local monuments or to be traded in the nearby Basilicata
The mapping and the analysis of geoarchaeological markers of sea-level changes at Torre Santa Sabina and Torre Guaceto/Scogli di Apani is instrumental in doing a reconstruction of the coastal landscape of Adriatic southern Apulia in late Holocene. The two chronological targets are the II millennium B.C. (Bronze Age) and the I century B.C. – V/VI century A.D. (Late Republican Roman Age – Late Antiquity)
The problem of Roman windows and their furnishings has never been studied seriously in this country as so little evidence is usually forthcoming. Window glass is found in fair quantities on most sites and, where the pieces are large enough to indicate size, they would appear to be no more than g to 12 in. square, but there is little indication of how they were fastened into the window. Such technical details have unfortunately escaped attention in those countries where sufficient remains have been found to attempt reconstruction. While R. Herbig has discussed windows generally: the most detailed treatment has been that by Vittorio Spinazzola in his survey of the excavations of Via dell’ Abbondanza at Pompeii. As he indicates, while houses were only of one story, the window openings tended to be very small slits but, as soon as an upper floor was built, more light could be obtained without sacrificing safety or privacy. Once the advantages of this became apparent, new and larger windows were inserted on the ground floor, architectural ingenuity being displayed in directing the light to particular parts of a room where it was needed. He touches upon the question of the infilling without adding much detail. Some of the smaller windows appear to have been openings in the wall with wooden, sliding shutters on the inside. The larger ones were filled with iron gratings in a form of a simple grille which has been reconstructed as horizontal flat bars, through which round vertical bars passed, a piece of construction which seems to be unnecessarily difficult. A grille, merely of crossbars, has also been found at Herculaneum.
Today, archaeologists are spending more and more time examining the past with the aid of computers. How does this increased dependence on technology affect the theory and practice of archaeology?Using Computers in Archaeology is a comprehensive review of computer applications in archaeology from the archaeologist's perspective. The book deals with all aspects of the discipline, from survey and excavation, to museums and education. Discussion covers the theoretical aspects of computer applications, with particular reference to GIS and the analysis of data, but technical jargon is kept to a minimum.With numerous illustrations, case-studies and examples, Using Computers in Archaeology is a timely introduction to this increasingly important area of archaeology, catering both for the student and the experienced archaeologist.
Today, the satellite-based monitoring of archaeological sites and site damage is a widespread practice, especially in conflict-affected regions. However, the vast majority of these remote sensing cultural heritage monitoring efforts have been led and conducted by remote researchers, and there remains an urgent need to embed this work within existing, in-country institutions at local and regional levels. Here, we present the archaeological site monitoring approach and results from the project Archaeological Practice and Heritage Protection in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq , a collaborative project between the Sirwan Regional Project and Kurdish Iraqi archaeologists aimed at generating a fully functional and sustainable programme of archaeological site management co-created with, and managed by, Kurdish Iraqi archaeologists and antiquities officials. Between August 2018 and February 2020, 376 archaeological sites in the Sirwan/Upper Diyala River Valley region, located in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, were assessed for damage by Kurdish Iraqi archaeologists in collaboration with the Sirwan Regional Project. This work represents the first large-scale, systematic dataset of archaeological site conditions and longer-term damage in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). Our results show that 86.7% of the assessed archaeological sites and 38.6% of the site surface area in this region were affected by damage between 1951–2018, and demonstrate the great urgency with which action must be taken to develop appropriate safeguarding measures for the KRI’s archaeological heritage. On the basis of these results, we outline relevant recommendations for the immediate protection of archaeological sites in Garmian and the greater Kurdistan Region.
Google Earth Engine is a cloud-based platform for planetary-scale geospatial analysis that brings Google's massive computational capabilities to bear on a variety of high-impact societal issues including deforestation, drought, disaster, disease, food security, water management, climate monitoring and environmental protection. It is unique in the field as an integrated platform designed to empower not only traditional remote sensing scientists, but also a much wider audience that lacks the technical capacity needed to utilize traditional supercomputers or large-scale commodity cloud computing resources.
The Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) investigates settlement and land use from the Neolithic to the present in the Erbil Governorate of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which includes a large portion of the core of the Assyrian Empire. In seven field seasons, it has documented a broad settlement landscape in a region of great social and political importance, especially in the Bronze and Iron Ages, including 728 archaeological sites. Its field methodology combines traditional surface collection with the use of historical aerial and satellite photographs, mobile GIS, and UAV (drone) photogrammetry. Preliminary results show some unexpected patterns: a high density of culturally Uruk settlements in the fourth millennium B.C., variable urban morphologies in the Early Bronze Age; and large but low-density settlements at the end of the Sasanian period or the early Islamic period. The project is explicitly testing several hypotheses about centralized Neo-Assyrian landscape planning in the imperial core. These hypotheses appear to be confirmed, although the situation was more complex than in surrounding provinces, probably due to the longer history of continuous settlement. Click here to download the PDF of this article.
Over the last 50 years, countries across North Africa and the Middle East have seen a significant increase in dam construction which, notwithstanding their benefits, have endangered archaeological heritage. Archaeological surveys and salvage excavations have been carried out in threatened areas in the past, but the formation of reservoirs often resulted in the permanent loss of archaeological data. However, in 2018, a sharp fall in the water level of the Mosul Dam reservoir led to the emersion of the archaeological site of Kemune and allowed for its brief and targeted investigation. Reservoir water level change is not unique to the Mosul Dam, but it is a phenomenon affecting most of the artificial lakes of present-day Iraq. However, to know in advance which sites will be exposed due to a decrease in water level can be a challenging task, especially without any previous knowledge, field investigation, or high-resolution satellite image. Nonetheless, by using time-series medium-resolution satellite images, combined to obtain spectral indexes for different years, it is possible to monitor “patterns” of emerging archaeological sites from three major Iraqi reservoirs: Mosul, Haditha and Hamrin lake. The Normalised Difference Water Index (NDWI), generated from annual composites of Landsat and Sentinel-2 images, allow us to distinguish between water bodies and other land surfaces. When coupled with a pixel analysis of each image, the index can provide a mean for highlighting whether an archaeological site is submerged or not. Moreover, using a zonal histogram algorithm in QGIS over polygon shapefiles that represent a site surface, it is possible to assess the area of a site that has been exposed over time. The same analyses were carried out on monthly composites for the year 2018, to assess the impact of monthly variation of the water level on the archaeological sites. The results from both analyses have been visually evaluated using medium-resolution true colour images for specific years and locations and with 3 m resolution Planetscope images for 2018. Understanding emersion “patterns” of known archaeological sites provides a useful tool for targeted rescue excavation, while also expanding the knowledge of the post-flooding impact on cultural heritage in the regions under study.
In this paper, we report the results of our work on automated detection of qanat shafts on the Cold War-era CORONA Satellite Imagery. The increasing quantity of air and space-borne imagery available to archaeologists and the advances in computational science have created an emerging interest in automated archaeological detection. Traditional pattern recognition methods proved to have limited applicability for archaeological prospection, for a variety of reasons, including a high rate of false positives. Since 2012, however, a breakthrough has been made in the field of image recognition through deep learning. We have tested the application of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for automated remote sensing detection of archaeological features. Our case study is the qanat systems of the Erbil Plain in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The signature of the underground qanat systems on the remote sensing data are the semi-circular openings of their vertical shafts. We choose to focus on qanat shafts because they are promising targets for pattern recognition and because the richness and the extent of the qanat landscapes cannot be properly captured across vast territories without automated techniques. Our project is the first effort to use automated techniques on historic satellite imagery that takes advantage of neither the spectral imagery resolution nor very high (sub-meter) spatial resolution.
This paper presents a selected aspect of research conducted within the Gaugamela Project, which seeks to finally identify the location of one of the most important ancient battles: the Battle of Gaugamela (331 BCE). The aim of this study was to discover material remains of the Macedonian military camp on the Navkur Plain in Kurdish Iraq. For this purpose, three very high resolution satellite (VHRS) datasets from Pleiades and WorldView-2 were acquired and subjected to multi-variant image processing (development of different color composites, integration of multispectral and panchromatic images, use of principle component analysis transformation, use of vegetation indices). Documentation of photointerpretation was carried out through the vectorization of features/areas. Due to the character of the sought-after artifacts (remnants of a large enclosure), features were categorized into two types: linear features and areal features. As a result, 19 linear features and 2 areal features were found in the study area of the Mahad hills. However, only a few features fulfilled the expected geometric criteria (layout and size) and were subjected to field groundtruthing, which ended in negative results. It is concluded that no traces have been found that could be interpreted as remnants of an earthen enclosure capable of accommodating around 47,000 soldiers. Further research perspectives are also suggested.
Satellite remote sensing is well demonstrated to be a powerful tool for investigating ancient land use in Southwest Asia. However, few regional studies have systematically integrated satellite-based observations with more intensive remote sensing technologies, such as drone-deployed multispectral sensors and ground-based geophysics, to explore off-site areas. Here, we integrate remote sensing data from a variety of sources and scales including historic aerial photographs, modern satellite imagery, drone-deployed sensors, and ground-based geophysics to explore pre-modern land use along the Upper Diyala/Sirwan River in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Our analysis reveals an incredible diversity of land use features, including canals, qanats, trackways, and field systems, most of which likely date to the first millennium CE, and demonstrate the potential of more intensive remote sensing methods to resolve land use features. Our results align with broader trends across ancient Southwest Asia that document the most intensive land use in the first millennium BCE through the first millennium CE. Land use features dating to the earlier Bronze Age (fourth through second millennium BCE) remain elusive and will likely require other investigative approaches.
Among the many results achieved by the Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project (LoNAP), one of the most notable was the discovery of a number of Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites distributed especially in the Plain of Navkur. One of these, Asingeran, is of particular significance due to considerable evidence of occupation dating to both periods, with a substantial continuation during the second millennium BCE (in particular during the Mitannian and Middle Assyrian period). Since 2018, Asingeran has been investigated by a joint archaeological project conducted by the University of Udine and the Directorate of Antiquities of Dohuk, which aims to throw light on its extensive archaeological sequence and in particular the late Neolithic - Chalcolithic periods. This paper discusses the results of the first archaeological campaign: albeit preliminary, the data to hand reveal Asingeran’s important contribution to our understanding of the development dynamics that characterised Northern Mesopotamia during the late 5th - early 4th millennium BCE. The study of Asingeran has furnished information that explains the site’s formation, its visibility in the plain and the existence of a hidden archaeological landscape that may characterise much of the plain of Navkur and probably a significant portion of Northern Mesopotamia.
This volume debuts the new scope of Remote Sensing, which was first defined as the analysis of data collected by sensors that were not in physical contact with the objects under investigation (using cameras, scanners, and radar systems operating from spaceborne or airborne platforms). A wider characterization is now possible: Remote Sensing can be any non-destructive approach to viewing the buried and nominally invisible evidence of past activity. Spaceborne and airborne sensors, now supplemented by laser scanning, are united using ground-based geophysical instruments and undersea remote sensing, as well as other non-invasive techniques such as surface collection or field-walking survey. Now, any method that enables observation of evidence on or beneath the surface of the earth, without impact on the surviving stratigraphy, is legitimately within the realm of Remote Sensing.
Paper basing on 10th ICAANE presentation, summarising the results of four seasons of field activities of the Upper Greater Zab Archaeological (UGZAR) Project in Iraqi Kurdistan.
This paper presents a preliminary report on the first two seasons of work by The Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project (LoNAP) of Udine University that aims to understand the formation and transformation of the cultural and natural landscape of northern Mesopotamia, (embracing large parts of the governorates of Ninawa and Dohuk) from the Palaeolithic to the Islamic period. Its purpose is to comprehend patterns of settlement, land use and management, based on a regional archaeological surface survey and excavation. These objectives are closely tied to the geoarcheological and bioarchaeological reconstruction of the ancient natural environment and its evolution as a result of global climatic fluctuations and human impact.
