ANCHISE Demo in Sicily: archaelogists testing ICONEM toolbox

On 4 September 2025, the ANCHISE project held its third demonstration session in Ragusa, Sicily, bringing together over 20 archaeologists, heritage specialists, and technology experts to test and evaluate digital monitoring tools developed by ICONEM.

The day began at Hotel Kroma with registration and welcoming remarks delivered by Saverio Scerra of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici, Ambientali e Culturali di Ragusa, alongside Rodolfo Brancato (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II), Olivier Henry (Université Lumière Lyon 2), and Titien Bartette, PhD, representing ICONEM. The presentation focused on the particularity of the field, its story, the looting problems and the actions that the archaelogists on the field are leading to protect the area. Participants then departed by bus to the site of Monte Casasia for a field visit before returning to the hotel for a workshop and evaluation session in the afternoon.

Monte Casasia necropolis

Monte Casasia, located in the municipality of Monterosso Almo, hosts one of Sicily's most significant indigenous funerary landscapes. The necropolis comprises approximately one hundred rock-cut chamber tombs (tombe a grotticella) dating to the VII and VI centuries BCE, characterised by rectangular or square burial chambers accessed via entrance corridors. Discovered in 1960, subsequent excavations have yielded ceramics, jewellery, and everyday objects. Particularly noteworthy is the evidence of a Greek settlement on the acropolis contemporaneous with the indigenous village, suggesting a coexistence of Greek colonists within the local social structure.

Saverio Scerra guided participants through the site, providing contextual and archaeological interpretation. Titien Bartette then explained how ICONEM had documented the site through 3D photogrammetric scanning and how this data was subsequently integrated into the platform.

Testing the ICONEM Monitoring Toolbox

The afternoon workshop focused on the Iconem Monitoring Toolbox, a web-based platform designed to detect traces of looting at archaeological sites. The tool combines high-resolution 3D photogrammetric models with satellite imagery analysis to identify, characterise, and date potential illicit excavations.

The platform operates as a multimodal scene viewer, integrating heterogeneous data sources into a single interactive interface. For the Monte Casasia pilot site, archaeologists were shown how Iconem had combined high-resolution 3D photogrammetric models with satellite imagery and multispectral analysis — including near-infrared imagery — to identify, characterise, and date potential traces of illicit excavation and other looting activities across the necropolis. The Multimodal Scene Viewer allowed participants to navigate the 3D reconstruction of the site, switch between visualisation modes such as elevation, slope, and intensity rendering, and overlay orthophotos and satellite imagery to cross-reference ground-level observations with remote sensing data. Measurement and annotation tools were also presented, enabling users to record distances, areas, and volumes directly within the 3D scene, and to document points of interest with associated metadata.

ANCHISE demonstrations are technical testing, but their central objective is also and most of all to engage end-users directly in the design process. Archaeologists were invited to assess the tool's efficiency, practicality, ease of use, and long-term adoption potential.

The session concluded with a structured evaluation and focus group facilitated by ABGI, ensuring that user feedback is systematically integrated into the tool's development.

*this article has been co-written with the help of Generative AI