Physical digital twins for ancient stone masonry informed of original construction techniques: the case of Sardinian nuraghi

A short review is provided regarding modern technical tools allowing to build digital twins for modelling ancient stone masonry structures and their physical behaviour. The objective of such tools is to assess the structural safety of cultural heritage masonry structures. The present work focuses on the particular case of Sardinian nuraghi, which are ancient corbelled stone masonry structures whose typical form is a truncated cone. As a starting point we consider a careful historical analysis of the construction techniques of those nuraghi. From this analysis, we address the choice of theoretical and numerical tools apt to construct a digital twin of complex nuraghi, in addition to delineating future challenges in building digital twins capable of simulating any physical process which may be relevant to ancient buildings.