- Title
- Using ground penetrating radar and resistivity methods to locate unmarked graves: A review
- Creator
- Berezowski, Victoria; Mallett, Xanthé; Ellis, Justin; Moffat, Ian
- Relation
- Remote Sensing Vol. 13, Issue 15, no. 2880
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rs13152880
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2021
- Description
- The location of unmarked graves in forensic and archaeological investigations is legally and culturally important. In a forensic context, locating covert burials of missing persons can provide closure to the family, as well as facilitating the successful prosecution of the individual(s) responsible. Archaeologically, burials provide an important source of information about health, diet, physical anthropology, and culture. Despite the importance of these features, the location of unmarked graves with conventional archaeological and forensic techniques, such as excavation, is difficult and expensive. As a result, geophysical techniques have been widely applied to the location of unmarked graves as they are non-invasive, cost and time effective, and avoid the unnecessary disturbance of human remains. This article brings together the literature on ground penetrating radar (GPR), and two resistivity methods, electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) and fixed probe resistivity (FPR), on their ability to locate burials and reviews their use in forensic and archaeological investigations. This paper aims to provide law enforcement personnel, archaeologists, geophysicists, and interested academics with an overview of how these techniques work, how they have been previously applied to grave detection, and the strengths and weakness of these methods.
- Subject
- geophysics; ground penetrating radar; electrical resistivity tomography; fixed probe resistivity; forensic science; archaeology
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1459305
- Identifier
- uon:45643
- Identifier
- ISSN:2072-4292
- Rights
- © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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