Palaeoenvironment reconstruction in the Lagoon of Venice through wide-area acoustic surveys and core sampling

Since 1999, a joint project called ECHOS has started to explore extremely shallow zones of the lagoon of Venice with the help of acoustic techniques. The main aim of ECHOS is to reconstruct the ancient lagoon environment and investigate its evolution and anthropogenic changes. Although this topic has been the subject of many studies, the use of acoustic methods can solve the problem of correlating the levels intersected by precision drilling, and it can reveal buried geological and archaeological structures. After the first in situ trials, during the last three years, an extensive acoustic survey was carried out on geo-archaeologically interesting areas in the central and northern Venice Lagoon. For this purpose, a traditional echosounder was modified for use in very shallow waters. A direct comparison of the acoustic and geological data shows the potential of acoustic methods for archaeological and geological research aimed at the reconstruction of the ancient morphology of the Venice Lagoon. As an example of the encouraging preliminary results that were obtained, we present the discovery of a buried palaeocanal.