Integrated Ground‐penetrating Radar and Archaeological Surveys in the Ancient City of Hierapolis of Phrygia (Turkey)

Abstract

Hierapolis of Phrygia (Turkey) was one of the most important Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine city in Asia Minor. The Italian Archaeological Mission in more than 50 years of activity has brought to light and restored many monuments of the ancient city, helping to understand the urban layout in the various periods of its history. In 2011 ground‐penetrating radar (GPR) prospection, with the aim of supporting the archaeological excavations and surveys, was performed in some important sample areas by a team of the Institute for Archaeological and Monumental Heritage of the National Research Council of Italy. The analysis of the GPR measurements revealed many anomalies that could be ascribed to archaeological structures, as well as other anomalies of presumable natural origin. The data collected were georeferenced in the digital archaeological map of Hierapolis using a RTK‐GPS system. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Structural detailing of buried Roman baths through GPR inspection

“…Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is well known as a viable equipment for locating buried archaeological remains [7][8][9][10][11]. Its effectiveness is mostly due to a wide range of available antenna frequency systems, which implies different possible depths and resolution of investigation, as well as to the enormous amount of information retrieved and possibility to obtain a tomographic plan view of the area investigated.…”

Using shallow geophysical methods to characterise the monumental building at the Segeda I site (Spain)

“…The most common application of geophysical methods in outdoor archaeological sites is to search for buried structures, i.e., a planimetric target (Novo et al, 2012;Leucci et al, 2013;Trinks et al, 2014). There are also many examples of geophysical techniques being used for studying the internal features of a structure (Pérez-Garcia et al, 2012;Nuzzo and Quarta, 2012;Moropoulou et al, 2013).…”

The Impact of Spatial Sampling and Migration on the Interpretation of Complex Archaeological Ground‐penetrating Radar Data

“…Neubauer et al ., ), single‐antenna instruments are still widely used, and the comparison of a few recent single‐antenna surveys shows a large variation in the profile spacing. It ranges from 0.1 m to 0.5 m, or from ~0.25 to ~4.25 times the dominant wavelength of the antenna (Böniger and Tronicke, ; Piro et al ., ; Novo et al ., ; Rogers et al ., ; Leucci et al ., ). Determination of the proper transect spacing is important because too coarse a sample interval causes aliasing: in the samples measured, high wavenumbers originating from diffractions with steep dips are misrepresented by lower wavenumbers (Yilmaz, ), so that the signal is distorted and the image of the buried archaeological structures can no longer be reconstructed unambiguously from the samples.…”