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Geoff Manaugh
In the center of Siena, Italy, there has been a cathedral for almost 800 years. A cake made of black and white layers of heavy stones, finely carved statues and rich mosaics, the imposing structure, now visited by more than a million tourists a year. It would seem a permanent detail of the past, present and future. Most people simply call it “the cathedral. “But Stefano Campana, a 53-year-old archaeologist at the University of Siena, calls it something else: “the church that is visual now. “
Campana has had its percentage of excavations, with the dust and sunburn that accompanies them. But archaeology, for him, is not about digging into the past; It also means observing it using a set of sensitive electromagnetic equipment. One of the devices used through Campana is a ground-penetrating radar, which transmits high-frequency waves through the earth to reveal “anomalies” (potentially architectural underground elements) in the signals bouncing off.
In early 2020, when Covid-related lockdowns emptied Italian tourist sites of their crowds, Campana and his collaborators obtained permission to inspect the interior of Siena Cathedral. Using tools originally developed to examine glaciers, mines and oil fields, they spent days scanning marble floors. and intricate mosaics, for walls and foundations in the depths. Once the selfie team disappeared, Campana and his team were able to locate evidence of earlier structures, including, potentially, a mysterious church built about 1,200 years ago, hidden like a shadow in radar data.
After seeing everything they have achieved during the lockdown in Italy, Campana and his collaborators have an idea of what could be imaginable with this technology. Ground-penetrating radar waves propagate at a fraction of the speed of light, so the entire procedure (transmission, reflection, recording) takes nanoseconds. With these new tools, archaeology is no longer a desktop activity, limited to a single site; Even when rushing, surveyors in the box can produce an accurate snapshot of what lurks beneath centuries of cobblestones and bricks, gum and debris.
“We thought, why not scan everything?” Campana reminded: “Why not scan all the squares, all the streets, all the courtyards of Siena?”Unlike the cathedral and its ghost church, these everyday places are unprotected, meaning they are threatened by trendy structures and developments. If imagination, they are what Campana calls “empty landscapes,” which he mistakenly considers insignificant to human history. He sought to replace that. Campana partnered with Geostudi Astier, a geophysical survey company from Livorno, to launch an initiative called Sotto Siena (“Lower Siena”). True to its acronym SoS, the commission aims to create a complete archaeological record of Siena before the city’s deep history is known. destroyed.
Last spring, I went to Siena in the middle of a heat wave to see SoS in action. Campana and I met in the central Piazza del Campo for coffee before heading to a park in a fancier part of town. Through Campana’s eyes, Siena must exist in overlapping worlds. As we climbed stairs and down alleys, past restaurants and plazas, he explained that radar can reveal the underlying walls beneath busy streets and gardens. Convenience retailers can hide Etruscan ruins under their cash registers. Even transient structures, long lost to wars, fires and history, can be rediscovered with radar. Some of the early SoS analyses, he said, uncovered evidence of small pavilions in Piazza del Campo, probably already set up for public fairs and festivals. as the fifteenth century.
When we arrived at our destination, a white van was waiting for us. Campana took me to Giulia Penno and Filippo Barsuglia, geophysicists at Geostudi Astier, who were unloading curtains for a study that night. His research team in the city consisted of an electric application vehicle. the length of a golf cart and a set of sealed boxes, dotted with ports and cables. As Barsuglia painstakingly subsidized the application vehicle to get it out of the van, Penno gave me a glimpse of the equipment. The boxes contained several heavy racks of radar equipment, which we towed a few inches off the ground. A Wi-Fi antenna would transmit knowledge to a rugged laptop. It is possible that in the winding streets of Siena we do not depend on transparent signals from satellites. The formula was supplied with inertial navigation, which uses gyroscopes and accelerometers to track any and all brakes and turns. Barsuglia claimed that it was the only formula of its kind in all of Italy, apart from the army.
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We start with a quick review of the park. I stood next to Campana and watched, curious to know what I was getting myself into. Penno was given the steering wheel and began his investigation, elegantly wrapping the cart around benches, lampposts, trash cans and the occasional Siena resident. “She’s like a painter,” Campana said approvingly. When he was finishing, Campana apologized and went by motorcycle to meet his family, leaving Penno, Barsuglia and me with our homework.
With Barsuglia now at the wheel, we embark on the nightlife of Siena. For a moment I realized that the experience was going to be less of a portrait than having to mow a giant lawn in heavy traffic. People didn’t seem to know. what to think of us passing by, mistaking our car for a street cleaning device or some kind of cellular art installation. Our vehicle hit the back of the rock many times, the radar housing scraping loudly against the cobblestones and concrete of the city. People stopped, laughed and filmed.
At sunset, we head to Siena’s Piazza Salimbeni, home to the oldest bank in the world. Along the way, the device had problems entering and leaving, a signaling problem,” Penno explained. The solution, Barsuglia said, is to circulate in giant eight-piece schemes that would trigger a device recalibration procedure. These wide drunken curls attracted even more attention. At one point, he raised his arm and stared at a small rotating orange light on the roof of the car, explaining that preventing a police car that was hovering by us, which had already overtaken us several times, would prevent us.
That night, our investigation ended well after midnight, so the three of us were about to sleep, circling in circles on an out-of-control archaeological track. I idea of Civilization and its Discontents, in which Sigmund Freud compares psychoanalysis to an archaeological study. research, suggesting that other forgotten versions of ourselves are buried in an afterlife that can be made visual by careful analysis.
In the case of SoS, this study took a few weeks. It was necessary to process gigabytes of data for each stretch of road and each square, matching what was underneath to its exact geographical coordinates. The visualization software completed the work, overlaying our findings on updated satellite maps. Our first glimpses of what appeared to be structural features have become subtle enough to make archaeological sense. In the end, we noticed many modern pipes and countless piles of historical masonry, probably at most pillars. of buildings razed long ago. Unfortunately, the investigation in Piazza Salimbeni did not reveal much. He hoped we could find a secret or lost medieval crypt. All we noticed were drains.
As burlesque as it may seem, my experience with SoS has presented a kind of barometer for archaeological studies in the twenty-first century. The discipline’s teams and strategies are evolving toward increasingly complicated (and practical) tactics for finding, mapping, and maintaining human historical sites. “The challenge of excavations is that they destroy what you’re studying,” Eileen Ernenwein, a professor at East Tennessee State University and co-editor of the journal Archaeological Prospection, told me. “You can take wonderful notes, keep smart records, and keep any and all artifacts you find, but never have another chance to dig again. “
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The immense functions of these new surveying tools, whether in terms of accuracy or speed, have encouraged archaeologists like Stefano Campana to dream of what once seemed like a fairy tale. If the task of SoS is ambitious, aiming to find everything that lies beneath the surface of an entire European city, other archaeologists on the continent were preparing for a much larger task.
“The average tourist doesn’t see or perceive the richness of a landscape like this,” Immo Trinks said, pointing to an empty box that seemed dark and windswept to me. We were 40 kilometers east of Vienna, in or on the ruins of a city called Carnuntum, which once stood along the northern border of the Roman Empire. The city was looted and abandoned centuries ago, and 99% of the site has yet to be excavated. But Trinks saw each and every wall and door. of Carnuntum, each and every street and each and every square, without ever digging a hole. “A very giant Roman construction has been detected here,” he said, pointing outdoors. It was a dense Roman city. ” He described a series of structures we had passed in the last few minutes, whose corridors and rooms were known only from electromagnetic data.
A visualization of the Roman Forum construction captured with ground-penetrating radar.
A radar scan of a Roman governor’s guard.
Immo Trinks and Alois Hinterleitner conduct radar investigations in Carnuntum, a ruined Roman city on the outskirts of present-day Vienna.
La Heidentor (“Gate of the Pagans”) in Carnuntum.
Trinks adjusts a field work of a satellite receiver at Carnuntum.
Hinterleitner at GeoSphere Austria in Vienna.
A GeoSphere Austria researcher pilots a ground-penetrating radar around the organization’s lawn in Vienna.
Although Lawrence B. Conyers is the world’s foremost expert on the use of ground-penetrating radars in archaeology, he warns against over-reliance on newer, faster machines.
Conyers at his home in Denver, Colorado.
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