'Some Methodological Considerations and Suggestions for Good Practice in Diagnostics and Visualizations of Complex Archaeological Sites: the experience of the Radio-Past project

The paper presents some methodological considerations collected in the framework of the EU-funded project “Radio-Past” (2009-2013). The core aim of this project was to develop well integrated non-destructive approaches for understanding, interpreting and visualising new and old research results on large and complex archaeological greenfield sites. As coordinators of this successful collaboration we address here issues of integration between remote sensing operations, geophysical and geo-archaeological survey, surface collection and “ground truthing”. This is illustrated with some results from case studies within the project, where approaches have been tuned according to the diverse ecological and cultural scenarios. These sites, considered as “open labs” for experimentation and development of new strategies, allowed also the creation of innovative VR reconstructions whose potential and limits can now be probed. The methodological suggestions presented here can be considered as good practice and of use in future archaeological projects integrating wide scale survey and digital reconstructions.