Detecting Moisture Damage in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage: a Brief Introduction

Abstract

Moisture damage is the most important issue in the preservation and integrity of cultural heritage. This paper discusses the ability of geophysical instruments to detect this problem. Non-destructive techniques (NDTs), such as Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), use electromagnetic (EM) impulses to investigate archaeological sites and building structures that are affected by moisture and can be used to locate and estimate the extent of damage and to develop restoration plans before permanent damage occurs. The main objective of this paper is to introduce the capacity of surface GPR to rapidly and non-invasively estimate physical soil properties, develop novel processing strategies and provide valuable information about the investigated material in archaeological and cultural heritage sites. This new approach analyzes the amplitude attributes of the GPR pulse obtained from conventional single-offset surface-coupled profiling. To achieve the objective of this study, the technique is examined in two different experimental test settings to show that GPR analyses clearly highlight dampness as ringing anomalies with a very low EM signal amplitudes that are caused by high attenuation, poor antenna coupling, and temporal stretching. These indicators are important for diagnosing cultural heritage sites by allowing for the correct and precise visuali-zation of radargrams and time-slices of the moisture anomalies.