Archaeological Prospection Case Study Halbturn

Since 2011 the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology is conducting a large-scale archaeological prospection case study at the Roman site of Halbturn in Burgenland, Austria. In the early 1990s the Roman villa of Halbturn was the first villa rustica in Austria that had been prospected in large-scale. The success of this research project was the main trigger for the choice of the site as one of the LBI ArchPro case studies in the year 2010. Instead of looking at the results of previous studies as something final, they were taken as a starting point for research questions that were not possible to pose in the past. The diversity and importance of the site reveals itself not at first glance. Conceived as a simple Roman village in the hinterland of Carnuntum, without lavish residential buildings or significant architecture, the villa differs from similar Pannonian settlements by one fact: a considerably larger number of preserved archaeological structures that bear witness to the Roman rural life, as in any other comparable villa rustica in the region.

The Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology is a research institute of the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft and was founded in 2010. The institute carries out its research activities together with several international partner organizations and aims to create a network of archaeological scientists supporting interdisciplinary research programmes for the development of large-scale, efficient, non-invasive technologies for the discovery, documentation, visualization and interpretation of Europe's archaeological heritage.

The lead partners of the institute based in Vienna, are the University of Vienna, the Vienna University of Technology, the Austrian Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics, the Province of Lower Austria, Airborne Technologies, the Roman-Germanic Central Museum in Mainz, the Swedish Central National Heritage Board, the IBM Visual & Spatial Technology Centre Vista at the University of Birmingham and Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research.