Innovating methods in archaeology: geophysics, geomorphology and geomatics – GEO-HERITAGE

Faced with the real estate and infrastructure development in many countries, it is important to implement strategies to be able to understand the earliest possible issue of the study and preservation of heritage, taking into account the administrative and legal specificities which supervise the operations of preventive archaeology in different countries.
The non-EU countries have not signed the Convention of Malta (except Turkey), or equivalent agreement: preventive archaeology then suffers a considerable delay compared to western countries. This often push the local services of Antiquities which have in charge the emergency excavations - and sometimes with little human and financial resources- to look after optimized tools for heritage management which help them to prevent new real estate or infrastructure projects in poorly known areas.
In this context, exploration by geophysical methods, coupled with other methods of archaeological survey, is a crucial preliminary approach for the management of archaeological heritage.
The objective of the Joint Laboratory GEO-HERITAGE is to develop tools offering to the services in charge of heritage protection an appropriate protocol analysis to evaluate the environmental and archaeological potential of a site or given regional area. Called to be used in very different environmental, geographical and geological contexts, the developed package must be able to integrate different sources of data from the archaeological survey (geophysical and geomorphological reconnaissance, aerial and pedestrian survey) while allowing mobility, easy setup and rapid implementation.
A first line of research will focus on mechanical and ergonomic optimization of equipment used and the data acquisition systems, particularly in geophysics. This will increase the mobility and performance of existing geophysical equipment by creating towed systems adapted to different ground conditions. The design of a universal acquisition interface, adaptable to different methods of geophysical survey, will allow simplified management of data as well as making simultaneous measurements in the case of a multi-methods surveys. The acquisition of large amounts of data will also require the development of specific software for the automation of data processing protocols and automatic detection of relevant information on geophysical images.
A second line of research will focus on the development of a unified use and extensive exploitation of different sources of data (i.e. geophysical, geomorphological and archaeological data). This complementary approach, especially for geophysical and geomorphological results, will return to the most informative state of a site - or a set of sites- in its environment. The integration of comparable metadata within a open source GIS (like QGIS by instance) will require the development of appropriate plug-ins protocols. The ultimate goal is to have a package of tools and protocols for environmental and archaeological reconnaissance in agreement with the need for a better management of heritage.