ABSTRACT
During the International Summer School electrical measurements have been collected employing Syscal Pro system. This instrument was very useful to train the students on the fi eld but unfortunately also extremely slow compared to the size of the sample areas and the resolution needed for archaeological tasks. The problem lies in the fact that we didn’t collect enough measurements during the School to get data about the samples and to compare the results with the other geophysical methods. To go over this issue, in autumn 2007 the site has been surveyed emploing the Automatic Resistivity Profi ler (ARP©). This system has been developed in France by the GEOCARTA company, a CNRS France spin-off (Dabas, this volume). The principle of ARP© is rather simple, relying on the standard galvanic electrical method, used widely for different applications since its discovery by Marcel and Conrad Schlumberger in the 1930s. The ARP© system was fi rst designed for agricultural applications in 2001. It was not until 2004, however, that the system was released for archaeological surveying, because of the need to enhance its positional and measurement accuracy. The surveyed area involves the whole of the Aiali site and its surroundings to a total extent of about 12 hectares. All the raw data have been processed by a 1D median fi lter along transect fi rst and then interpolated by a spline bicubic process on a squared mesh (40 cm × 40 cm for investigation depths 0-50 cm & 0-100 cm but 50 cm × 50 cm for the deeper one (0-170 cm). In this occasion we show the maps of apparent electrical resistivity at different depths of investigation using a black & white colour scale (Figs. 1 and 2). We decided to publish the maps of the whole site but we should outline that at this stage of the research on the Aiali site it would be unfair to do any parallel between the ARP result and the other methods (excluding the magnetic map of Helmut Becker) outside the sample areas. Fluxgate and Overhouser magnetic systems and GPR surveyed only the areas inside the samples. Anyway we have to admit that the results of ARP are extremely interesting. The ARP© data makes it possible to add new and extremely signifi cant information to the western side of the surveyed area but also to integrate information on known features (this volume, part II, Putting everything together…). The survey also produced a high resolution DTM of the investigated area.
