The island of Sardinia has been of particular interest to geneticists for decades. The current model for Sardinia's genetic history describes the island as harboring a founder population that was established largely from the Neolithic peoples of southern Europe and remained isolated from later Bronze Age expansions on the mainland. To evaluate this model, we generate genome-wide ancient DNA data for 70 individuals from 21 Sardinian archaeological sites spanning the Middle Neolithic through the Medieval period. The earliest individuals show a strong affinity to western Mediterranean Neolithic populations, followed by an extended period of genetic continuity on the island through the Nuragic period (second millennium BCE). Beginning with individuals from Phoenician/Punic sites (first millennium BCE), we observe spatially-varying signals of admixture with sources principally from the eastern and northern Mediterranean. Overall, our analysis sheds light on the genetic history of Sardinia, revealing how relationships to mainland populations shifted over time.

water varies significantly. Given that δ 2 H can also vary between species, care should be taken when including and comparing different species 26,27. Humans demonstrate starkly different δ 2 H values from co-local fauna, and a smaller range in both δ 2 H and δ 18 O than in the fauna. We posit that human-specific dietary and cultural factors (e.g. cooking, agricultural modification) are at play, and the isotopic separation between humans and their habitat indicates a high degree of environmental manipulation. Methods Samples. Bone samples were obtained from five sites dated to the Bronze and Iron Ages: Los Berrocales

Abstract:In this paper, the authors present a recent integrated survey carried out on an archaeological urban site, generally free of buildings, except some temporary structures related to excavated areas where multi-chamber tombs were found. The two methods used to investigate this site were thermal infrared and ground penetrating radar (GPR). The thermography was carried out with the sensor mounted under a helium balloon simultaneously with a photographic camera. In order to have a synthetic view of the surface thermal behavior, a simplified version of the existing night thermal gradient algorithm was applied. By this approach, we have a wide extension of thermal maps due to the balloon oscillation, because we are able to compute the maps despite collecting few acquisition samples. By the integration of GPR and the thermal imaging, we can evaluate the depth of the thermal influence of possible archaeological targets, such as buried Punic tombs or walls belonging to the succeeding medieval buildings, which have been subsequently destroyed. The thermal anomalies present correspondences to the radar time slices obtained from 30 to 50 cm.