From acoustics to underwater archaeology: Deep investigation of a shallow lake using high-resolution hydroacoustics—The case of Lake Lednica, Poland

Abstract

One of the main challenges of underwater archaeology is to develop non-invasive research of heritage sites in order to enable their further protection for future societies. This study explores, identifies and classifies archaeological objects in a shallow lake using underwater acoustics. We solved the aforementioned challenges by developing an innovative, object-based, fuzzy-logic classification of nine archaeological object categories based on multibeam echosounder bathymetry, 13 secondary features of bathymetry and 106 underwater diving prospections. We achieved an 86% correlation with ground-truth samples, and 49% overall accuracy. The unique and repeatable workflow developed in this study can be applied to other case studies of underwater archaeology around the world.