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Cultural heritage is the creative expression of a people’s presence in the past. It represents a driving force to create, develop, and consolidate the sense of identity, belonging, and citizenship, as well as a means to appreciate the diversity of people and develop a policy for peace and mutual understanding. Furthermore, heritage is a source of economic development and a key factor for sustainable development. The dissemination of such values among people and the transmission of heritage to the future generations entail putting into the field proper actions, from the knowledge to the protection and conservation, and from the enhancement to the fruition and management. Such requirements increasingly involve the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) that can be considered the paradigm shift to create novel job opportunities in the field of cultural heritage. This paper aims to discuss an experience led by the Institute of Archaeological and Monumental Heritage of the (Italian) National Research Council (IBAM-CNR), with students of a secondary school of the Basilicata region (Southern Italy). The experience developed within the framework of the School-Work Alternation (SWA) (recently renamed “Pathways for Transversal Competences and Orientation” by Italian law), a training modality envisaged in the Italian school system to bring the school closer to the world of work by proper partnership between formal education contexts and external organizations. The SWA Project revolves around the acquisition of some technical and methodological tools for the approach to knowledge, conservation, and enhancement of cultural heritage, having particular regard for diagnostic tools and ICTs. This article deals with the outcomes of the activities developed during the Project, discussing both the technical-professional and transversal skills acquired or expected to be acquired by the students. In addition, starting from the results of the activities, the authors speculate about possible outlooks of SWA in the heritage field considering: (i) the role of such a training path in raising young people’s awareness to preserve cultural heritage by becoming active and proactive citizens; (ii) the relationship of SWA with regional and European-supported development policy strategies; (iii) the potential benefits that SWA can provide for cultural heritage from the synergy between different institutional actors.

This paper deals with a UAV LiDAR methodological approach for the identification and extraction of archaeological features under canopy in hilly Mediterranean environments, characterized by complex topography and strong erosion. The presence of trees and undergrowth makes the reconnaissance of archaeological features and remains very difficult, while the erosion, increased by slope, tends to adversely affect the microtopographical features of potential archaeological interest, thus making them hardly identifiable. For the purpose of our investigations, a UAV LiDAR survey has been carried out at Perticara (located in Basilicata southern Italy), an abandoned medieval village located in a geologically fragile area, characterized by complex topography, strong erosion, and a dense forest cover. All of these characteristics pose serious challenge issues and make this site particularly significant and attractive for the setting and testing of an optimal LiDAR-based approach to analyze hilly forested regions searching for subtle archaeological features. The LiDAR based investigations were based on three steps: (i) field data acquisition and data pre-processing, (ii) data post-processing, and (iii) semi-automatic feature extraction method based on machine learning and local statistics. The results obtained from the LiDAR based analyses (successfully confirmed by the field survey) made it possible to identify the lost medieval village that represents an emblematic case of settlement abandoned during the crisis of the late Middle Ages that affected most regions in southern Italy.

This paper deals with the approach used to create the digital cultural heritage map (hereafter, c.h.) of the mountain village of Cancellara and its territory, located in Basilicata, Southern Italy. The map is thought to be an exhaustive georeferenced catalogue of sites of cultural interest to bring fresh insights and new life to the c.h. and support decisions for their protection, management and valorization by the municipality and public bodies, national and regional, designated to fulfil the duties in ensuring the protection and accessibility of cultural heritage. A digital c.h. map is also important and useful for scholars who conduct studies and investigations as well as for private companies and cultural associations which work in the field of Cultural and Creative Industry. This map allows access to information useful for the reconstruction of the history of the place, dispersed among various private and public archives or unpublished. The map includes a chart at the territory scale, and more detail for the built-up area and its historical centre. It summarises data from heterogeneous sources.

Despite the recognized effectiveness of LiDAR in penetrating forest canopies, its capability for archaeological prospection can be strongly limited in areas covered by dense vegetation for the detection of subtle remains scattered over morphologically complex areas. In these cases, an important contribution to improve the identification of topographic variations of archaeological interest is provided by LiDAR-derived models (LDMs) based on relief visualization techniques. In this paper, diverse LDMs were applied to the medieval site of Torre Cisterna to the north of Melfi (Southern Italy), selected for this study because it is located on a hilly area with complex topography and thick vegetation cover. These conditions are common in several places of the Apennines in Southern Italy and prevented investigations during the 20th century. Diverse LDMs were used to obtain maximum information and to compare the performance of both subjective (through visual inspections) and objective (through their automatic classification) methods. To improve the discrimination/extraction capability of archaeological micro-relief, noise filtering was applied to Digital Terrain Model (DTM) before obtaining the LDMs. The automatic procedure allowed us to extract the most significant and typical features of a fortified settlement, such as the city walls and a tower castle. Other small, subtle features attributable to possible buried buildings of a habitation area have been identified by visual inspection of LDMs. Field surveys and in-situ inspections were carried out to verify the archaeological points of interest, microtopographical features, and landforms observed from the DTM-derived models, most of them automatically extracted. As a whole, the investigations allowed (i) the rediscovery of a fortified settlement from the 11th century and (ii) the detection of an unknown urban area abandoned in the Middle Ages.