Public Archaeology and Open Data: a New Deal for Supporting and Interpreting Excavations

Archaeological excavations are currently active at Orgeres - La Thuile in the Aosta Valley (NW Italy). The efforts from both academic players and local policy makers are addressed to operate an inclusive synergy, where excavations are the focus around which research, didactic, local business and tourism can rotate to generate mutual benefits. The declared research goal is to look for traces suggesting reading keys useful to describe ancient occupations of the area. In spite of the well-known applications of Geomatics in archaeology, in this work authors explicitly intend to make clear the high potentialities resident in those geographical data, generally released for free from institutional players by Geoportals, that were not specifically intended for an archaeological use. In the case study here presented some suggestions are given about the possibility of jointly using medium density point clouds from ALS, aerial hyperspectral images, high resolution true colour RGB aerial digital orthoimages. Presented results are preliminary.