Archaeologists have mapped a Roman city using ground-penetrating radar

https://www.archaeology.wiki/blog/2020/06/09/entire-roman-city-revealed-without-any-digging/

by mutnedjemet1980 • 6 years ago

99 19 6 years ago

archaeology.wiki

adolph• 6 years ago

I wonder what the tradeoffs are between ground penetrating radar and Muon tomography?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_tomography

http://www.bldgblog.com/2008/08/mayan-muons-and-unmapped-roo...

hwillis3• 6 years ago

Muons scanning works for seeing through things, not into them. There are no muons coming from underground because the Earth blocks them. Scanning the pyramids (fun fact: you can DIY a muon detector for <$100) relies on the fact that muons coming from the sun are all highly collimated- they're all travelling in the same direction. Because of that you know that a muon coming from direction x passed through point y.

If you wanted to image underground with muons, you're basically using them as backlight- muons come from behind the detector, penetrate the ground, and occasionally reflect backwards into the detector. Since the return point and angle are random you wouldn't be able to do it without a very expensive muon source or detector.

amerine• 6 years ago

Is there hobbyist ground penetrating radar?

MayeulC2• 6 years ago

Nothing prevents you from digging deep holes at a known position, and wait for the tomography magic to happen :) I don't think it has ever been used this way, though.

If the area to image at once is large, or to use the sun while it is higher up in the sky, one would need to dig deeper... I also guess that this works better at higer latitudes, where the sun has a wider range of angles over the year.

Luc• 6 years ago

Here's the published article with more images: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

PTOB• 6 years ago

Thank you.

afeezaziz• 6 years ago

Is this possible with SDR?

BurningFrog2• 6 years ago

Looks like we're entering a Golden Age of non invasive archeology!

joe5150• 6 years ago

a monumental discovery in Mexico was also recently made possible with non-invasive technology (excavation is now underway, though).

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/largest-and-oldest...

virmundi• 6 years ago

The invasiveness is still necessary. We want to get to the goodies. However we might be able to know what’s there without having to manually dig first.

BurningFrog2• 6 years ago

I imagine a huge number of new sites being explored cheaply with radar, with only the most promising few percent actually being dug out.

giorgioz• 6 years ago

I always thought something like the Ground Penetrating Radar GPR would be very useful to determine where to the ruins are and avoid them while building a subway. One of the (many) reasons why Rome has only 3 subway lines is that it's very common to find ancient rome building while digging.

Archaeologists have mapped a Roman city using ground-penetrating radar

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