From acoustics to underwater archaeology: Deep investigation of a shallow lake using high‐resolution hydroacoustics—The case of Lake Lednica, Poland

Abstract

One of the main challenges of underwater archaeology is to develop non‐invasive research of heritage sites in order to enable their further protection for future societies. This study explores, identifies and classifies archaeological objects in a shallow lake using underwater acoustics. We solved the aforementioned challenges by developing an innovative, object‐based, fuzzy‐logic classification of nine archaeological object categories based on multibeam echosounder bathymetry, 13 secondary features of bathymetry and 106 underwater diving prospections. We achieved an 86% correlation with ground‐truth samples, and 49% overall accuracy. The unique and repeatable workflow developed in this study can be applied to other case studies of underwater archaeology around the world.