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Monks across the desert. Hermitic life in Christian Petra A new interpretation of the pre-Crusader phase of the site follows from the identification of a pre-Crusader rock-cut chapel. In particular, in early mediaeval time, a monastic community at al-Wu’ayra and a number of hermitic cells surrounding a central fortified coenobium preceded the later military castle keep. The Crusaders profited by the presence of a Christian fortified settlement, easy to transform into a military installation by a simple addition of a number of buildings, which are identifiable by a chrono-typology of building techniques.The new program of research which started in 2017 aims at registering, surveying, and studying various hermitic installations around the perimeter of the town in order to contextualize this early medieval phase of al-Wu’ayrain the topography of Petra and contribute to the knowledge of a ‘minor’and underestimated aspect of the town in early Christian time. In fact, these monastic-hermitic settlements located in segregated spots of the peri-urbanarea, surviving the abandonment of the major churches of the town, can help to understand in a more realistic way the articulated forms of Christian presence and its duration until the late 19th century.

Within this article are the results of a geoelectrical survey performed in the park of Pratolino at Vaglia (Florence, Italy), using the multiple dipole–dipole profile technique. The purpose was to outline the location of the main body of the ancient Villa Medici di Pratolino, of which only a separate building, now known as Villa Demidoff, is visible in its full splendour. The three-dimensional probability-based electrical resistivity tomography inversion (PERTI) approach has been adopted. The three-dimensional resistivity tomography inversion provides evidence at the expected depth of burial of a regular pattern of resistivity relative maxima, mostly distributed along the sides of a mesh closely resembling the structural plan of a building. The almost perfect superposition of the high resistivity source image over an official historical plan of the ancient Villa Medici has allowed the regular mesh of the resistivity maxima to be ascribed to remains of walls. As the Pratolino case-history is one of the first applications of the PERTI algorithm to real field datasets, its performance has been tested using the well-known ERTLab commercial software as a benchmark. The comparison has shown a very good agreement between the two inversions and also confirmed the much higher computing speed and greater versatility of the PERTI algorithm, as outlined in a previous paper where only synthetic models were tested. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.