Abstract
Archaeoseismology is one of the four issues usually involved to increase the knowledge of seismic risk. The three other issues are seismic records, historical seismicity, and palaeoseismicity. Archaeoseismology was founded as a discipline in the 1980s. It was developed and methodologically defined during the 1990s and 2000s, and its new developments and perspectives are based on two procedures. First, the numerical field, with tools like the database OPUR (Outil Pour Unités de Réparation), “Tool For Reparation Units”, conceived as a sort of atlas, to collect and index all the types of repairs identified in the Roman site of Pompeii, in Italy. Second, the focus on the evolution of ancient buildings and their pathologies, serves as a basis for the structural modelling, carried out by engineers. It allows to understand the behaviour of ancient buildings during seismic motion, to quantify the impact of seismic effects on cultural heritage and to propose a method of preservation. Major studies conducted in France as well as recent developments in this field are presented, in order to illustrate this collaboration between archaeoseismologists and engineers for the preservation of cultural heritage.
Highlights
Archaeoseismology is a relatively new discipline whose main objective is to recognize the effects of past earthquakes on ancient buildings or settlements
All this scientific impulse around earthquakes and their effects on cultural heritage led to the first multidisciplinary study on archaeoseismology in France: the case study of the Nîmes Roman Aqueduct, built in the middle of the first century AD
After the APS group multidisciplinary work example in Manosque, an interdisciplinary strategy based on: innovative techniques to identify damage associated with past earthquakes from the inventory of repairs introduced in the building archaeology [ANR-RECAP, 2018]; realistic seismic input signals consistent with the seismotectonic context; digital building models implementing realistic geometry and construction materials as well as robust modelling of masonry behaviour was at the core of the work performed by Montabert et al [2020] in Sant’Agata del Mugello, a medieval church located in the Mugello alluvial basin in Tuscany (Central Italy)
Summary
Archaeoseismology is a relatively new discipline whose main objective is to recognize the effects of past earthquakes on ancient buildings or settlements. Historians and archaeologists, and seismologists and other researchers in earth and environmental sciences, were brought together to discuss earthquakes and their effects. Helly [1984], an epigraphist working at that time on Thessalian inscriptions (North of Greece), focused on the indications concerning earthquakes and their effects on ancient constructions. Through his epigraphic studies, he was the instigator of the Valbonne meeting [Helly and Pollino, 1984] that gave birth to the discipline. We can deduce that observational seismology existed very early in antiquity” [Bousquet and Péchoux, 1981]
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