ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to offer a brief overview on the most interesting activities fulfilled by members of the COST (European COoperation in Science and Technology) Action TU1208: Civil Engineering Applications of Ground-Penetrating Radar, concerning the use of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and complementary nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques in archaeology and cultural heritage diagnostics. The chapter focuses on the use of GPR for archaeological prospection. In this field, a wider application of GPR and complementary noninvasive investigation techniques needs to be fostered for the identification and visualisation of buried archaeological heritage. It deals with the use of GPR for the assessment of monuments, historical buildings, bridges and statues. TU1208 members have developed and released interesting open source or freeware tools for the electromagnetic modelling of GPR scenarios, the most significant being a new version of the software gprMax, which implements the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) technique.
