Visualising and researching complex prehistoric cemetery sites: the Ossi project (Sardinia, Italy)
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2018-12-25

Sardinia (Italy) is known for its rich heritage of standing prehistoric monuments, ranging from Neolithic megalithic sites, to Copper Age rock-cut tombs and Bronze Age nuraghi towers. Rock-cut tomb cemeteries present a double challenge for archaeologists. The first one is documentation: each tomb represents a complex underground architecture, and up to 20 of them can be scattered over the irregular landscape of a cemetery. No satisfactory methods have been applied so far to record and present such complex spatial information. The second challenge is contextualisation: very little research has been devoted to the broader landscape context of these Sardinian cemeteries and their relationship with settlements. This paper presents the results of a recent project in Ossi (Northwest Sardinia), where rock-cut tomb cemeteries dating from the Late Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age have been surveyed, using close-range and drone photogrammetry combined with dGPS geo-referencing. Systematic fieldwalking around the cemeteries have been carried out in order to produce a detailed dGPS distribution map of surface finds and structures, which suggest settlement areas associated with the cemeteries. All the results were grouped together and processed in a GIS platform. The project shows how an integrated methodological package not only help record and present complex archaeological spatial data, but also tackle specific social questions about the cultural use of the landscape in the past.

Guillaume Robin, Florian Soula