Archaeological exploration of Tappeh Hissar, Damghan using forward and inverse modeling of Ground-Penetrating Radar data

Abstract

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) method is a non-destructive geophysical method that is used to detect subsurface heterogeneities and also recognition of various shallow targets. In present research, forward and inverse modeling of GPR data applied for archaeological study has been made. The study area is Tappeh Hissar, Damghan, in which GPR data along several survey lines have been acquired using 250 MHz shielded antenna for archaeological investigations. To achieve the goal, the real radar-gram of a survey line in the area has been obtained after applying different processing operations containing signal saturation correction and applying band-pass, auto-gain control and background re-moval filters on the GPR data using Reflexw software. Then, the synthetic radargram corresponding to the real radargram has been simulated using finite-different time domain (FDTD) method. After-ward inversion method with solution of an optimization problem was employed for validation of in-terpretation of GPR radargram in order to detect buried targets. The results of this research, that are based on the agreement between the radargram obtained from the real GPR data and the synthetic radargram corresponding to the real radargram, confirm the correctness of the interpretation of sub-surface archaeological investigations in the area, and thus, indicate the capability of application of GPR method for archaeological exploration.