Archeology and Geophysical Diffraction Tomography

I know I am probably living under a rock here, but has anyone heard of this being used successfully for archeology and excavations?

A few quick questions for those who know: why must the microphones be buried in the ground for this to work? Can't they develop a more sensitive, yet accurate, microphone that works above, or just touching the surface? It would be nice to have a machine that could comb large swaths of land in shorter periods of time.

Also related, how wide of an area can you survey using the current technology?

 

no you are not living under a rock! I do a decent amont of work in Achaeology over the last few years. I have not been on a project that used GDT or with but it does sound useful.

I will try to anwser your questions as best as i can...
The reason the microphones need to be underground is the need for a 3-d image.
I would bet that the mics are all at different depths from the surface, so you can calculate the distances and get a 3-d image.

You could put the mics on the surface (and their might be) but i think you would not get a very good 3-d image using just the surface.

I have no idea how much area you can cover at a time, but there are 2 limiting factors i think. You have guessed one: the sensitivity of the mics. if the mics can't pick up the vibrations the computers can't do their calculations on the data. The other would be what is actually under the ground. If there is a lot of stuff underneath the ground it would be very hard to get a picture of what is really going on. I would also think that the soil or ground would need to be fairly uniform.

here are a few websites I found that might help:

http://www.archaeology.org/9603/abstracts/negev.html

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/archtechnology/index.shtml