Prehistoric and historic monumental funerary structures in the “Chott el Jérid” area (Southern Tunisia). The importance of photogrammetry for rapid and complete documentation in Saharan contexts

As part of the Tunisian-Italian archaeological joint mission to the Sahara, a research project (survey and excavation) has focused since 2015 on the study of the funerary archaeology of the prehistoric and historical communities of southern Tunisia. The surveyed area, located along the southern and eastern edges of Chott el Jerid (governorate of Kebili), was selected, after scrutinizing the information collected by the “Service Géographique de l’Armée Française” during the early 20th century about the funerary structures. In this paper, we present two main archaeological funerary contexts and the methodology applied for the photogrammetric documentation of the architectural features of the structures. Then we present the post-processing of the point clouds carried out to obtain a complete data-set for the remote analysis of the excavation sequence of each tumulus. By adopting a multi-scalar approach, from GIS remote analysis to photogrammetric documentation of individual funerary structures, we have tried to optimize the chances of fieldwork activity, taking into consideration whilst so doing the contingencies due to the fluctuating socio-political situation that characterizes some countries of North Africa in recent years.