ABSTRACT
M. Dabas Département de Géophysique Appliquée, UMR Sisyphe, Université Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris VI, France
ABSTRACT: The aim of the presentation given during the International Summer School in Archaeology at Grosseto in July 2006 was to show the principle of a new towed system devoted to electrical mapping of soils: the ARP© system (Automatic Resistivity Profiling) and to give some examples obtained with this system in Archaeology. The principle of the ARP© is very simple because it relies upon the standard galvanic electrical method widespread for different applications since its discovery by Marcel and Conrad Schlumberger in the 30s. Effectively, the ARP© system was first designed for agricultural applications in 2001 (GEOCARTA company, spin-off from CNRS, France). It was not before 2004 that the system was released for archaeological surveying, due to the necessary increase in terms of positional accuracy and measurement accuracy. We will discuss first from a more theoretical point of view the design of such instruments through 1D (one dimensional) and 3D numerical simulations in order to compare the responses with other instruments in the market and in order to design the optimal geometry of the ARP system. Depth of investigation and spatial response of these instruments are inferred from these calculations. On the other hand, the instruments have practical limitations in terms of their design, calibration, use in the field, etc. and these points have to be taken also into consideration. For that purpose, a practical comparison between existing sensors was done during the European Conference on Precision Agriculture in 2003. This comparison was also performed to validate the previous theoretical results. Finally, the design of this new instrument, now used at a wide scale by Terra NovA, will be explained with some recent results on archaeological sites.
