Archaeological geophysics in arid environments: Examples from Israel

Israel is a country with mostly arid environments where is localized extremely large number of archaeological objects of various age, origin and size. The archaeological remains occur in multi-layered and variable geological–archaeological media. In many cases physical properties of the ancient objects are disturbed by long-term influence of arid conditions. These disturbances strongly complicate interpretation of observed geophysical anomalies since the useful signal/noise ratio is often sufficiently reduced. Another disturbing factors are the influence of uneven topography, oblique polarization (especially, for magnetic field analysis) and industrial-engineering objects of different kinds situating in the vicinity of studied remains. From a rich arsenal of the developed techniques (the most part of them is described in Khesin et al. (1996)) in the paper are presented the methods of advanced quantitative analysis of potential geophysical fields and 3D magnetic field modelling. A brief archaeological-geophysical review indicates that in Israeli archaeological sites were applied practically all near-surface geophysical methods: beginning from the paleomagnetic examination and ending by microwave remote sensing. Such a diversity of applied methods and constant accomplishing of geophysical, archaeological and other data stipulate creating of a multi-linkage as between the various geophysical methods, so also with other archaeologically related databases.