Tel Aviv, Israel (TML) – Forget Machu Pichu or Angkor Wat, many of the world’s archeological sites are located close to cities, if not inside them, and suffer the encroachments of roads, homes and factories.
If there isn’t a road, farm or a factory on the site already, an archeologist is likely to face objections from property developers or government officials anxious to get on with business or building. Technology exists that lets scientists see below the surface for signs of structures and artifacts of the past, but it has severe limitations. Everything from electric power to water mains can disrupt the results while sites with artifacts from multiple historical periods appear as a jumble.
Now, an Israeli team led by Lev Eppelbaum, a geophysicist at Israel’s Tel Aviv University, says it has developed an algorithmic toolkit that addresses these problems. It lets researchers process archeological data collected by using magnetic and other geophysical fields in finer detail than previously possible while eliminating all the so-called “noise” that has confounded surveys until now.
“In urban development, many archeological sites are damaged or disturbed,” Eppelbaum told The Media Line. “But, making geophysical observations and analyses of sites before they build new roads or factories will allow us to see what there is underground. It can answer the question, ‘Do we need to excavate this site or is it secondary?’”
Israel alone may have some 20,000 archeological sites in a country of some 22,000 square kilometers (8,500 square miles). Many of the most potentially important findings are under the streets of Jerusalem, the site of much Biblical history, not to mention Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader and later periods. Today it’s a bustling city of 750,000 people.
Israel is so replete with archeological history that builders can’t begin construction until the archeologists have been called in. That’s an extensive and time-consuming process. Further complicating matters are religious sensitivities. Key sites, like the Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem’s Old City, are off-limits to archeological digging altogether.
Eppelbaum says conducting an examination using his Multi-PAM (physical archeological models) systems can cut the cost of surveying a site by 30 or 40 times.
Even where there are no problems of urban sprawl, archeologists typically don’t have the resources to explore more than 5% of a site over a period of many years. Geophysical methods can save them a lot of spadework, telling them where they can expect to find remains and to a large extent what they can expect to find. It can also provide a library of sites for future excavation.
“If they are correct it is amazing,” said Yosef Garfinkel, who holds the Yigal Yadin chair of archeology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has conducted digs at sites such as Sha’ar Hagolan, the site of a Neolithic settlement south of the Sea of Galilee.
“I excavated Sha’ar Hagolan, which covers 20 hectares (50 acres), and after 11 years we had excavated just 0.3 hectare of it,” he told The Media Line. “Even if they could survey just one quarter of the site, they can give you a map and you can excavate the right 1-2%. If it works, it can show site how the site is organized – its houses, streets and buildings.”
The Multi-Pam system can process data collected from seven geophysical fields, including magnetic, gravity, temperature and piezoelectric to look underground for the kind of objects and structures archeologists seek. It even makes use of radio transmitters used to communicate with nuclear submarines.
Components of the developed interpreting system were successfully tested at several Israeli archaeological sites, including Beit-Guvrin, a site mainly from the Hellenistic period; Megiddo, a site where no fewer than 26 cities were built and destroyed over the centuries; and Banias, where it was used to detected the underground remains of ancient Roman construction from limestone. Multi-PAM was also tested at sites in Italy, Germany, Austria, France and the U.S.
The technology could reach even greater heights. Data collection could be taken on remotely-piloted vehicles (RPVs), or drones, of the type used by armies to undertake reconnaissance missions and hunt down terrorists, Eppelbaum said. He said that flying several meters above the ground, they could gather huge amounts of information, including areas barred to archeologists on religious grounds.
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