Geomagnetometry for Archaeology.

In the last decades the magnetic surveying became popular as one of the most effective techniques supporting the archaeological prospecting. This was possible because the existence of susceptibility contrasts between the cover soil and several buried finds often causes detectable anomalies. More recently, great advances were made in signal enhancement and boundary analysis of potential field anomalies, thanks to methods allowing a suitable differentiation of the field without to make unstable the process. Meanwhile, new 3D imaging tecniques provided an estimate of the magnetization distribution within the subsoil by means of high-resolution images of the source distribution. Most of these methods are fast and reliable in presence of shallow and compact sources, just like in the case of the sources usually occurring in archaeological prospecting.Nevertheless, a great efforce is spent to overcome serious problems causing low signal-to-noise ratio in the measurements. The paper just provides a step-by-step description of technical solutions adopted to improve the quality of data and to perform a better interpretation of the magnetic anomalies usually associated to the presence of archaeological finds. To this end, a summary of case histories is illustrated giving a general framework of the latest progress in archaeomagnetism.