Forensic geophysical survey to investigate illegal looting of asite of historical importance

Objects of forensic investigations vary from illegally buried weapons and explosives,landmines and improvised explosive devices, drugs and weapons caches to clandes-tine graves of murder victims and mass genocide graves, environmental crime. Illegalexcavations represent one of the main risks which affect the archaeological heritageall over the world. They cause a massive loss of artefacts but also, and above all, aloss of the cultural context, which makes the subsequent interpretation of archaeo-logical remains very difficult. Various techniques are available for forensic crimesearch teams. These techniques allow for the detection of a hidden object success-fully. Near-surface geophysical search methods have been dominated by ground-penetrating radar (GPR) but recently other techniques, such as electrical resistivity,magnetometric, time domain reflection have become more common. The geophysicalinvestigation was required to investigate the presence of illegal looting in an arealocated 1 km north from the archaeological park of Pompeii. For this purposecombined GPR and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) were used. Results revealthe presence of an illegal tunnel and offered the opportunity to investigate suchareas not previously systematically documented