They plowed on it. They sowed barley and broad beans there. No wheat. At that point the land was shallow for wheat. The promontory was that of Marmilla. The unmistakable skyline, the sinuous landscape, like an indelible mark smoothed by the wind that has always caressed those majestic roundnesses sculpted on the horizon. Oreste Sanna, owner of those lands in the Barumini countryside, would never have imagined it. The first intuitions were not archaeological. The first to suspect that it was not a hill like the others were the labourers. For the people of that triangle between Las Plassas, Tuili and Barumini, that well at the top of that hill, however, was nothing other than “Sa Funtuna”. Until the child prodigy of Marmilla, the one who became an archaeologist against the wishes of his grandfather who wanted him to be a notary, began to survey the landscape with the Nuragic eyes of a Sardus Pater.
Nuragic awakening
Giovanni Lilliu always said it: I am a Nuragic person, I simply woke up a few thousand years after the great civilization of the Sardinian people. The Professor, at the time a young archaeologist born in the promised land of the Nuraghi, did not take long to translate the abscissas and ordinates of that place as mysterious as it was secret. He reasoned like a man from another era, as if those small, lively eyes had x-rayed that hill at the entrance to Barumini. Intuition, ability to interact with the memory of the most ancient ancestors, precise surveys with the technique of landscape archaeology, harbingers of impressive discoveries. The dawn is that of the fifties when that small man decided to try some tests in the land predestined for the Pantheon of the World Heritage Site.
The discovery of the Palace
The confirmation is confirmation: inside that hill there is the most impressive deposit of the ancient Nuragic civilization of Sardinia. Sa Funtana was nothing more than a tower of the ancient bastion, the archaeological structure that appeared in those terrestrial findings was the first cry of the great Royal Palace of Barumini. It didn't take the young nuragic prophet long to convince the then Superintendent Gennaro Pesce: an impressive excavation campaign was needed to bring to light the structure of the large nuraghe, protected over the centuries by earth and vegetation. No sooner said than done. Forty local labourers, mostly war veterans, the draft oxen taken from the plowshare of the countryside as engines. The economic accounts of the operation show a cost of twenty million lire. Work began on May 14, 1951, finishing on November 15, 1956. Nowadays it would have taken twenty years, not five. He, Giovanni Lilliu, long-sighted and with Nuragic eyes, achieved with the "brothers of a great adventure" the first real Nuragic undertaking since the post-war period, restoring one of the masterpieces of the ancient civilization of the Sardinian people to its magnificence. Seventy-two years later the long gaze of Sardus Pater crosses that of artificial intelligence on the way to the land of the Nuraghi. The new frontier of the Nuraghi now enters the boundless world of the most advanced science, as if that exquisite mind of Barumini's child had surrendered the Nuragic chromosomes to that infinite calculator of parameters, algorithms, coordinates and ordinates, axial evaluations and archaeologist's intuition. Three advanced research centers have thought of putting together all the nuragic elements, from the recognizability of the landscape to the interpretation of the signs, from the scanning of geology to that of anthropization, all aiming to "fill" the artificial brain with every useful element to "artificially" discover the still secret and mysterious places of the Nuragic civilization. The Institute of Heritage Science of the CNR, the Department of Computer Science and the Interdepartmental Research Center DigiLab of the Sapienza University of Rome. The project signed by six researchers, Augusto Palombini, Edoardo Baiocchi, Romeo Lanzino, Saverio Giulio Malatesta, Marco Raoul Marini, Paolo Rosati is summarized in the title: «NuragAI», analysis of images of the Sardinian landscape guided by artificial intelligence, in search of unknown monuments. Artificial eyes and intelligence to scrutinize the land of Sardinia, x-ray it, using those parameters that allowed the dawn of Nuragic archaeology, with human eyes, analysis and intuitions, to discover real primordial cities buried by time, by the earth and from vegetation. In summary, the study just published by the research centers has put on paper a model of territorial analysis, precisely «NuragAI», which through artificial intelligence aims to «analyse satellite images, in order to identify nuraghi monuments ( typical monuments of the Sardinia region, Italy, lasting from 1.8 to 0.7 thousand BC), exploring the landscape and attempting a systematic survey of the Sardinian island". The data that the researchers provide are still covered by scientific "secret", but from preliminary training, "an exceptionally positive outcome and a previous trial of use" emerge. For the researchers "the satisfactory results are leading the study towards a systematic analysis of satellite images of the entire Sardinian region, in order to verify new monuments and open new perspectives for the use of artificial intelligence in archaeological research". The research starts from the analysis of the Great Nuragic Civilization, from what Lilliu and the immense forge of Sardinian archaeologists have brought to light in the last century. A map that has repeatedly put in black and white the diffusion and high number of monuments discovered and registered. «However, - the researchers write - no research has been conducted based on the applications of artificial intelligence for image analysis». The development of the analysis has two cornerstones: what is known and what is still unknown. We start from a sample of 2000 "positive" (presence of nuraghe) and "negative" (absence) satellite aerial images. By processing a myriad of elements, they set themselves the goal of «achieving an algorithm capable of automatically recognizing the elements of the nuraghe and obtaining a complete database of the monuments of the entire region».
Artificial nuragic
The highly scientific project aims to use an artificial intelligence system in the field of Nuragic archaeological research to "learn" to identify the characteristics of the nuraghi through an experimental phase, in order to analyze the whole of Sardinia with the aim of verifying the presence of unknown finds and verify the reliability of the scientific model in the field. This is where all the most advanced technologies related to artificial intelligence come in. The study, in fact, uses an architecture based on attention, called Vision Transformer, similar to a Recurrent Neural Network. In the simplest terms possible, it is an automatic "encoder" capable of interpreting the territory. In practice we could talk about super-eyes, super-attentive, hyper-intelligent, capable of reading, analyzing and returning simulations beyond what can be seen on the field.
The revolutionary tests
The scientists took it safe: «The tests were performed using a 10-fold cross-validation scheme, thus calculating the average of the results of 10 different tests. The network was trained on 100 epochs on 1000 positive and 1000 negative images in about an hour." The final result is disruptive: «The experiment gave an exceptionally interesting result: the system correctly recognizes 98.73% of the aerial photos in which a nuraghe is present, right from its easiest phases. A deeper analysis revealed that failures occurred when the surrounding environment is similar to the most common environments of the positive samples: when there is a high similarity between a terrain of the negative example and a surrounding nuraghe, the system could fail. The architecture appears robust thanks to the results obtained with a dataset of only 2000 samples." After the enlightened mind of Giovanni Lilliu, the era of artificial "nuragic" intelligence looms over the great civilization of the Sardinian people.
