Geophysical Prospection in Archaeology

In recent decades, Applied Geophysics has become firmly established among geoscientific methods in archaeology for the non-destructive prospection of archaeological remains in the subsurface. Significant contributions have been made by technical developments towards mobile multi-channel platforms that can survey even very large areas of Hundreds of hectares with high spatial resolution and positioning accuracy in cm-range. Today, magnetometry and ground penetrating radar are not only used in research projects targeting known archaeological sites, but also as a professional commercial service in linear and urban planning projects. In the presentation an overview of the current state of the art will be given. The application of the available prospection techniques will be presented with examples, including archaeo-geophysical surveys done along the power lines SuedLink and SuedOstLink in Germany. An essential point in the presentation of the results arises from the interdisciplinary cooperation between geophysics and archaeology. A deeper understanding from the point of view of the user, in this case archaeology, is necessary to properly evaluate the geophysical data in terms of their archaeological significance.