What lies beneath?

June 13, 2012

This is not just the title to a 2000 American supernatural drama-horror film starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer as a well-to-do couple who experience a strange haunting that uncovers secrets about their past but it is also the subject of the DART project or more accurately the Detection of Archaeological Residues using remote sensing Techniques (DART) project.

This is a Science and Heritage three year, £815,000 funded initiative led by the School of Computing at the University of Leeds to examine the complex problem of heritage detection on archaeological sites.

The project has attracted a consortium consisting of 25 key heritage and industry organisations, academic consultants and researchers from the areas of computer vision, geophysics, remote sensing, knowledge engineering and soil science.

A better understanding of ‘what lies beneath’ is important for the long-term curation and understanding of our heritage because there are certain geologies and soils which can complicate the collection and interpretation of heritage data.

In the past some of the traditional detection techniques of tracking soil moisture have not provided enough detail so DART is looking at developing  a deeper understanding of the factors and detection dynamics of more challenging sites to allow the identification of appropriate sensors and conditions for feature detection in the future.

The DART research will address issues relating to what factors produce archaeological contrasts and how do these vary over space and time. It will try to establish what causes these variations and how to best detect these contrasts.

By investigating the physical and environmental factors that influence archaeological residues the team aims to improve site detection and the key to this will be the interaction between the local soils/sediments and vegetation/crops. Using sensor measurements and samples the team will develop models to understand these interactions, contrasts and differences. In time an interpretative and knowledge-based management framework including decision tools to help curators determine the condition of buried archaeological residues and sensor configurations appropriate for their detection will be produced which will enhance the discovery of sites from appropriate archival imagery. Clever stuff!

Where does Van Walt come in? We have supplied an Automatic Soil Profiling System – the PICO Profile. This is a new generation of modular profile probes that give precise soil moisture data of selected soil horizons to depths of up to 4 metres. Used with a GlobeLog this system provides a long term, fixed installation for the precise measurement of soil moisture.

Needless to say despite being manufactured for onsite conditions there have been one or two issues – mice eating through cables was something that couldn’t have been anticipated! However, we have taken further precautions to protect the cables, re-installed the sensor and live data is being fed to a website for analysis.  You can see the data on our website, visit https://www.vanwalt.com/telemetry-system/ and select the Soil Moisture option to see the live data feed.

For more information on this type of equipment call us on +44 (0)1428 661 660.