Archaeological survey by GPR for recovery from 3.11 great earthquake and tsunami in East Japan

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) has widely been accepted in geoengineering, and recently, many successful applications are reported in archaeological survey. After the East Japan great earthquake and tsunami 2011 which killed more than 15,000 and many houses must be relocated from seashore to inland, and we have many demands of archaeological surveys. In order to solve this problem, we have developed an array GPR system “Yakumo” which is consists from 8 transmitter and 8 receivers, operating at 50MHz-1.5GHz. Using this new array GPR system, we could achieve very fast GPR data acquisition. By using multi-static radar signal processing, we could achieve high resolution imaging and CMP processing. However, GPR survey on an uneven ground surface, such as burial mound (Kofun) provides us only very poor quality GPR images. We have many places like this in this occasion. Then, we have established new GPR techniques combined with high-precision positioning measurement instrument which include iGPS and total station. Using these systems, we could demonstrate high quality GPR profiles in Sakitama-kofun, Dangoyama-Kofun and Kassenyama-kofun.