From Space to Ground. Digital Techniques for the Investigation of Monuments and Sites

Abstract

The scope of this work is to present an integrated methodological multi-scale and multi-temporal approach for the study of ancient monuments in their environmental context. The presented work showcases the interdisciplinary research experience gained during the last years by the Remote Sensing and Geo-Environment Lab (ERATOSTHENES Research Centre) of the Cyprus University of Technology. The developed capabilities of the Eratosthenes Research Centre derived from the successful implementation of various national and European research projects within the wider area of architectural heritage study and protection. In this framework geospatial tools, earth observation and in situ monitoring and measurements were merged and further investigated. The case study concerns Paphos town in Cyprus and particularly the archaeological site of Nea Paphos and the Hellenistic necropolis "Tombs of the Kings", a UNESCO World Heritage Site.The study encompasses a variety of technological tools to approach the area of interest, moving from a landscape level (macroscale) to isolated monument scale (micro-scale). For the macro-scale approach novel earth observation and aerial image (semi-macro scale) processing techniques have been employed, while in a micro-scale level the study extents from the geometric documentation of the tombs to the image processing mapping surface weathering features, as well as seismic performance of single monuments. The overall results demonstrate that such geospatial data linked to the individual characteristics of each monument can assist towards the implementation of various directives and conventions, while offering an integrate understanding of the monuments state of preservation, not seen as an isolated unit, but as part of its natural and anthropogenic environment, inevitably affecting its viability in time and place. High resolution Low resolution Medium resolution Archive aerial images Recent very high resolution orthophotos 3D documentation Seismic performance Façade image processing (a) Fig. 3. Map indicating anthropogenic and natural hazards over Paphos District as follow: (a) Landsides map: very high hazard and high hazard areas are indicated with red; (b) Erosion map: areas where the soil loss is greater than the mean value soil loss of the whole district are indicated with red ; (c) Salinity map: areas closesly to the sea are indicated with red; (d) Tectonic activity: high and very high hazard area are indicated with red; (e) Urban expansion; (f) Road network proximity (250 m); (g) Drainage network (50 meter buffer zone) and (h) Fires map observed during the period 2010-2013 (see more details in [4]).The overall results, generated hazard maps for each type of threat which was then grouped together following the AHP methodology [4]. These results were then further improved [6], based on the clustering of the monuments prior to the AHP evaluation. The various archaeological sites under investigation (including those mentioned in this paper) have been grouped into five main categories based on thei...

Assessment and Restoration of an Earthquake-Damaged Historical Masonry Building

“…Scope of this study is to show the effectiveness of rigid diaphragms on the improvement of the performance of masonry structures under earthquake loading for various safety levels. Furthermore, this study shows that simplified linear analysis can give realistic-even conservative-results and advanced analysis methods (Syrmakezis et al, 1995;Asteris et al, 2005;Kyriakides et al, 2016Kyriakides et al, , 2018Caddemi et al, 2017;Casamassima and D'Amato, 2019), as well as advanced material models (Asteris et al, 2005(Asteris et al, , 2014Asteris and Giannopoulos, 2012;Apostolopoulou et al, 2017) are not always needed, as they require extensive experimental investigations (Chronopoulos et al, 2012;Lysandrou et al, 2017) and time consuming analysis validation (Asteris et al, 2017(Asteris et al, , 2019.…”