Articles by Nicola Masini

The phenomenon of lost villages in the late Middle Ages is a topic as complex as it is stimulating for historians and archaeologists. It raises many questions regarding the causes of the abandonment. To answer these questions, systematic studies are required along with detailed surveys of the investigated areas in order to detect the lost villages and to understand the relationships between sites and landscapes. In this context many problems arise, among them, for example, the detection and identification of anthropogenic and geomorphological features. This is a difficult task, especially for complex areas and settlements built on the top of hills and mountains, as in the case of Yrsum, located in the Basilicata Region (Southern Italy). In Yrsum, field work, the study of historical sources, the processing and interpretation of satellite imagery and DTM derived from Lidar survey, allowed us to reconstruct the urban shape of the village in its different functional and spatial components as well as to identify features linked to geomorphological pattern. This opens new investigation perspectives for both the assessment of endangerment of the cultural site and the study of the factors which caused the abandonment of this emblematic study case.

The paper concerns the research activities of the IBAM-CNR and the IMAA-CNR in the field of archaeological remote sensing with the use of very high resolution images of QuickBird, the satellite with the greatest geometrical resolution available for civil use. These images have an enormous potential in the study of ancient urban and territorial contexts and for the identification and spatial characterization of archaeological sites, particularly when aerial photos and recent detailed maps are not available. During the archaeological research in Hierapolis of Phrygia (Turkey) and in southern Italy (Monte Irsi, Monte Serico, Jure Vetere and Metaponto), the examination and the study of panchromatic and multispectral images of QuickBird made it possible to detect surface anomalies and traces linked to ancient buried structures or to paleo-environmental elements; moreover, panchromatic images were georeferenced and used as the base field maps for the survey in Hierapolis, together with GPS systems. The satellite images were analysed both for the identification of archaeological features and for the characterisation of the contexts in which these elements were found. During field work, the traces and the anomalies identified in the images were constantly verified, so as to determine their actual relevance to archaeological elements, to interpret them and, where possible, to specify their chronology, thus avoiding misunderstandings and errors. The images were used in all phases of the research in combination with the aerial photographs and the available maps; they were also used for presentation of the results and were draped on DEM for the 3D visualization of the territories and of the archaeological features. In order to highlight particular archaeological traces and anomalies some image processing methodologies were adopted: multispectral processing and algorithms of data fusion (with the integration of the high spatial resolution of panchromatic images with the spectral capability of multispectral images), of enhancement (such as PCA, NDVI and TCT) and edge detection.