Elisa Pompianu

After more than two decades, archaeological investigations in the Punic necropolis of Villamar, in central-southern Sardinia, have resumed. The first three years of research have led to the highlighting and the excavation of fourteen new graves of various types. The funerary complexity of the site is appreciated especially thanks to the Tomb 16, a hypogean chamber with input to cockpit used to bury twenty-eight people at least. In general the excavation provides a very interesting picture of a Sardinian rural site of the IV-III century BC, with some peculiarities regarding the knowledge on Punic funerary rituals.

In this paper, the authors present a recent integrated survey carried out on an archaeological urban site, generally free of buildings, except some temporary structures related to excavated areas where multi-chamber tombs were found. The two methods used to investigate this site were thermal infrared and ground penetrating radar (GPR). The thermography was carried out with the sensor mounted under a helium balloon simultaneously with a photographic camera. In order to have a synthetic view of the surface thermal behavior, a simplified version of the existing night thermal gradient algorithm was applied. By this approach, we have a wide extension of thermal maps due to the balloon oscillation, because we are able to compute the maps despite collecting few acquisition samples. By the integration of GPR and the thermal imaging, we can evaluate the depth of the thermal influence of possible archaeological targets, such as buried Punic tombs or walls belonging to the succeeding medieval buildings, which have been subsequently destroyed. The thermal anomalies present correspondences to the radar time slices obtained from 30 to 50 cm. Furthermore, by superimposing historical aerial pictures on the GPR and thermal imaging data, we can identify these anomalies as the foundations of the destroyed buildings.