
Archaeologists have mapped a Roman city using ground-penetrating radar - mutnedjemet1980
https://www.archaeology.wiki/blog/2020/06/09/entire-roman-city-revealed-without-any-digging/
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Luc
Here's the published article with more images:
[https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/c...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/BE7B8E3AE55DB6E03225B01C54CDD09B/S0003598X20000824a.pdf/groundpenetrating_radar_survey_at_falerii_novi_a_new_approach_to_the_study_of_roman_cities.pdf)

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PTOB
Thank you.

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giorgioz
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.

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

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virmundi
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.

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

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_tomography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_tomography)

[http://www.bldgblog.com/2008/08/mayan-muons-and-unmapped-
roo...](http://www.bldgblog.com/2008/08/mayan-muons-and-unmapped-rooms/)

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hwillis
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.

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MayeulC
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.

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AlotOfReading
You'll find the water table is a bit of an issue and the deeper you dig, the
more expensive it gets. In general, archaeologists don't have a lot of
funding, so you'll see extreme cost sensitivity in methodologies.

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MayeulC
Touché :)

But a dumb detector with a nice protective layer might be achievable, I guess?
And maybe archeologists can get support from a local drilling company? Not
sure how deep you'd need to dig, TBH, but that would be an interesting
experiment.

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afeezaziz
Is this possible with SDR?

