Floridablanca archaeological site: 3D electrical imaging study

OSELLA, ANA; DE LA VEGA, MATIAS; LASCANO, EUGENIA

Hyderabad, India

Workshop; 17th Workshop on electromagnetic induction in the Earth; 2004

Floridablanca is a 18th century archaeological site located in South Argentina. The archaeological investigations at the site began in 1998 and in 2000 we started a project to perform geophysical studies there. In this work we present the implementation of electric and electromagnetic methods in a sector of the site which corresponded to the settler?s houses. The objective of the prospection was to characterize the zone and the buried archaeological structures (adobe walls, tiles from a roof collapse) with 2D and 3D electric and electromagnetic techniques. We first applied an Electromagnetic Induction Method covering a 600 m2 area within a frequency range from 1000 to 19000 Hz. A 3D visualization of the In-Phase and Quadrature components gave a first description of anomalies possibly associated with buried structures. We then performed eighteen dipole-dipole profiles and we inverted the data to obtain the corresponding 2D and 3D electrical tomographies. Finally, after correlating the information obtained from the analysis of both the electromagnetic and electric data we performed a more localized 3D dipole-dipole mesh (25 m2) to achieve the final electrical imaging of the most representative buried structure. The results obtained in this paper were lately confirmed by an archaeological  excavation.