The Middle Ages have been traditionally considered a crisis period due to the demographic decrease and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe. Nevertheless, the historical reconsideration has been focused not only on decline and decay, but also on resilience and recovery which characterized the Europe of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. So, today the main open question is as follows: how can we explain the diverse attitude (namely recovery versus decline) and the reasons why some settlements were more (or less) resilient than others? To provide a contribution to this issue, we focused on two medieval villages which are located very close to each other (in the Basilicata Region Southern Italy) and selected because they are characterized by diverse vicissitudes: Irsi abandoned in the fourteenth century and Montepeloso (still “existing” and renamed Irsina) where the population of Irsi moved to. To improve our current knowledge on Irsi, we reused and integrated multiscale LiDAR datasets in order to cope with the lack of documentary source. The use of LiDAR data enabled (i) the reconstruction of the potential urban fabric of Irsi, along with its temporal development and the transformation of the surrounding landscape, and (ii) the definition of a hypothesis about the causes of its desertification based on the inter-site analysis between Irsi and Montepeloso. The main results from the LiDAR-based analysis were as follows: (i) the diachronic reconstruction of the building phases of the village and (ii) the identification of a significant indicator obtained as the ratio between the amount of cultivatable land (close to the settlement area) and the population to characterize the resilience behavior in hilly landscape. This approach has been also successfully applied to another similar case study. Outputs from our analyses pointed out that LiDAR data can fruitfully improve medieval archaeological investigations and facilitate knowledge improvement from intra to- inter-site scale analyses and from local up to a landscape perspective.

由于西欧的人口减少和经济恶化，中世纪一直被认为是危机时期。然而，历史的反思不仅集中在衰落和衰败上，而且集中在 14 和 15 世纪欧洲的复原力和复苏上。所以，今天主要的悬而未决的问题如下：我们如何解释不同的态度（即恢复与下降）以及一些定居点比其他定居点更具（或更少）弹性的原因？为了对这个问题做出贡献，我们关注了两个彼此非常接近的中世纪村​​庄（在意大利南部的巴西利卡塔地区），之所以被选中，是因为它们具有不同的沧桑：Irsi 于 14 世纪被遗弃，Montepeloso（仍然“现有”并更名为 Irsina），Irsi 的人口迁移到那里。为了提高我们目前对 Irsi 的了解，我们重用和集成了多尺度 LiDAR 数据集，以应对缺乏文献来源的问题。LiDAR 数据的使用使 (i) 重建了 Irsi 的潜在城市结构，以及其时间发展和周围景观的转变，(ii) 基于 Irsi 和 Montepeloso 之间的站点间分析，关于其荒漠化原因的假设的定义。基于 LiDAR 的分析的主要结果如下：(i) 村庄建设阶段的历时重建和 (ii) 作为可耕地量（接近定居区）和人口来表征丘陵景观中的弹性行为。这种方法也已成功应用于另一个类似的案例研究。我们的分析结果表明，LiDAR 数据可以卓有成效地改进中世纪考古调查，并促进从内部到站点间规模分析以及从本地到景观角度的知识改进。