Articles by Benedetto Villa

In recent years Remote Sensing applications in archaeology have become increasingly frequent. This plurality of applications depends mostly on the rising interest of the scientific community in modern methods for surveying geographic data, which have become increasingly powerful, automatic and reliable. Remote Sensing, with its various techniques, offers the rapid acquisition of a huge quantity of metric and qualitative data in order to describe or to identify archaeological sites. For an appropriate and widespread use of these data, it is still necessary to have recourse to GIS techniques; as a matter of fact, only the combined use of both methodologies provides a full exploitation of their potential for an in-depth understanding and an effective utilization of data related to an archaeological site. The authors illustrate some case studies concerning use of remote sensed data for cartographic applications and detection of possible buried archaeological structures.

The diffusion of the use of Geographical Information Systems in archaeology has considerably increased in recent years. This multiplicity of applications is due mainly to the growing interest of archaeologists in modern methodologies for the management of archaeological data, surveyed by topographic, photogrammetric and remote sensing techniques. GIS have become a fundamental tool for managing, sharing, analyzing and visualizing spatially referenced data and they are completely substituting the traditional techniques used by archaeologists, based upon filling out forms, graphics and other paper documents. Besides in the modern global society, dominated by mass media such as Internet, the issue of utilization has become more and more important, and most of the more recent GIS applications (Multimedia GIS, WebGIS) take this aspect into consideration.