Articles by Gloriana Pace

Thesaurus Project aims at promoting the knowledge of the underwater cultural heritage, ancient and modern, through the application of several typologies of tools: underwater autonomous vehicles, which will be able to explore the sea bottom in teams communicating with each other; a database, which will be useful to store and manage all the information referring to archaeological or historical objects, shipwrecks and sites. This paper aims to explain the logic structure of the database indicating the particular needs of the research, the different typologies of items which have to be managed (archaeological and historical objects; ancient, medieval or modern shipwrecks; underwater sites; written or figurative sources, etc.), the relation with other similar databases and projects. The main task of this part of Thesaurus is to plan and organize an IT system, which will allow archaeologists to describe information in detail, in order to make an efficient managing and retrieving data system available.

During the years 2006-2007, three teams of scientists (archaeologists with geophysicists) detected the archaeological surface of the Late Antique villa at Aiano-Torraccia di Chiusi (Siena, Tuscany) using GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar), Resistivity and Magnetometry. Their aim was to identify archaeological remains and consequently spend less time and money on digging. At the conclusion of the fieldwork and data treatment, they used a CAD program to overlap geophysical and archaeological layers and check geophysical results on archaeological remains. Despite surveys in many other archaeological sites, they obtained few results: surveys located anomalies in less than 1/4 of the archaeological remains excavated in 2008 and 2009. In this paper the authors attempt to analyze (and try to find better solutions for the future) errors in the geophysical surveys caused by incorrect calibration of the database, low accuracy of grid intersections and excessively long grid lines, in relationship to site conditions and the kinds of archaeological remains. These technical problems in fact certainly create a less than optimal operational synergy between archaeologists and geologists during the post-processing of the data: an analysis of these problems may help to improve future projects of this type.