Horus Project: aerospace technologies for the archaeological research

The work will present the project “Horus. Aerial visions of the archaeological space”, coordinated by the Department of Cultural Heritage: Archaeology and History of Art, Cinema and Music and the Center of Studies and Activities for Space “Giuseppe Colombo” (CISAS) of the University of Padova. The research was funded by the University in 2014 as best innovative project proposed by students.Its main goals deal with the investigation of the ancient environment using innovative remote-sensing and aerospace technologies. Two test-sites were chosen among the ongoing excavations and studies of the Department in order to evaluate a set of new methodologies and apply them in very different archaeological contexts. In particular we are analyzing the proto-historic village of the Bostel di Rotzo (VI, Italy), that was be surveyed with a commercial UAV (DJI Phantom 2 equipped with a GoPro Hero 3) and a custom octocopter equipped with a FLIR IR camera and a GoPro Hero 4 mounted on a gimbal specifically designed for the project. The graeco-roman site of Tebtynis (Egypt) is currently being investigated through the general plans produced at the end of the excavationsin the late 1930s and through archival aerial documents recorded by the Royal Egyptian Air Force in the same years. All these historical data will be analyzed and compared with recent satellite photos and other media such as multi/ iper-spectral and radar imagery, which will be acquired, post-processed with open source and proprietary softwares and interpreted in relation to the chronological and geographical coordinates of the site. In particular a digital version of a hand made map of the ’30s will be overlapped on the actual available images. The results will be implemented in a GIS platform in order to store, manipulate and analyze the spatial and archaeological data of both the considered contexts.