ABSTRACT This study presents a multi‐method non‐invasive investigation of an approximately 4‐ha area associated with the long‐occupied coastal settlement of Rocavecchia (Apulia, southern Italy), situated between the prehistoric fortified peninsula and the Hellenistic‐Messapian walls. Two research questions guided the analysis: First, under what circumstances does the combination of remote sensing, geomagnetic survey and fieldwalking enable reliable chronological attribution of subsurface features? Second, how does the joint interpretation of independent datasets contribute to reconstructing settlement dynamics beyond the known fortifications? To address these questions, multi‐temporal aerial and satellite imagery, vertical gradient geomagnetic prospection and systematic fieldwalking were integrated within a GIS framework. A feature‐based interpretative workflow was developed to formalise the logic connecting geomagnetic anomalies, surface artefact distributions and imagery‐derived evidence, making explicit both the correspondence criteria and the degree of residual uncertainty for each classified feature. The results show that multi‐method integration reduces interpretive ambiguity in a complex palimpsest landscape but does not resolve it univocally: Chronological attribution remains interpretative for most anomalies, and its reliability scales with the degree of convergence between independent datasets. The feature‐based workflow developed here demonstrates that formalising the interpretive logic, rather than relying on implicit visual synthesis, allows uncertainty to remain visible and spatially localised where datasets do not converge. The study further indicates that occupation extended into the extra‐mural zone across multiple phases, while defining the conditions under which such inferences can be sustained from non‐invasive proxies alone.
Guarino et al. (2026) studied this question.