Remote sensing, archaeology and historical records: looking for 1624 earthquake traces in San Giorgio parish church of Argenta (Italy)

Abstract

The present work is part of a research program financed by INGV in order to look for traces of earthquakes occurred in the past on historical buildings. At that aim, a method based on remote sensing techniques was proposed and applied to San Giorgio parish church in Argenta (Ferrara, Italy). That church was chosen because of notable availability of historical and archaeological material, already catalogued in the past years, allowing the identification of structures belonging to periods before and after the 1624 earthquake. Data provided by terrestrial remote sensing techniques (digital photogrammetry supported by laser scanning) made possible the recognition of patterns that could be due to that strong seismic event or, in general, to one or more calamitous events. The results show that the proposed method can provide potentially useful data to help confirming or excluding historical hypotheses or helping to fill information gaps. However, it should be stressed that the proposed approach does not enable the identification of unknown seismic events, providing instead data that can be associated with already known events.