Monitoring Environmental Degradation of Archaeological Monuments Using Remotely Sensed Environmental Observations: Insights from Delphi, Epidaurus, Olympia, and Aigai
摘要
A significant issue faced by cultural heritage monuments, located at open-air heritage sites, is degradation due to environmental pollution, climatic changes, and other environmental variables. Understanding how various archaeological sites and monuments are affected is the first crucial step towards mitigating these challenges, improving predictive capabilities, and aiding in the development of targeted conservation strategies to safeguard cultural heritage for future generations. Within this context, current scholarship has introduced new generation of dose–response functions capable of estimating the corrosion and soiling of specific materials, particularly in cultural monuments, making use of satellite sensed environmental data instead of ground-based ones. These degradation model tools are called “Satellite Sensed Data – Dose Response Functions (SSD-DRFs)” and their main advantage is that they are applicable in areas where no ground-based pollution-environmental monitoring network is present. This study focuses on investigating the levels of limestone corrosion and soiling on monuments at the archaeological sites of Delphi, Epidaurus, Olympia, and Aigai. The research investigates the changes in corrosion and soiling estimations at the studied sites during five different one-year periods from 2005 to 2018. According to the obtained results, limestone corrosion levels at all investigated archaeological sites are similar and, except Delphi, they remain almost constant during the studied period. As for the soiling of monuments, different archaeological sites exhibit variations. We are also investigating how the new degradation model tools can support sustainable cultural heritage management.