Test and Application of Magnetic Survey in Detecting Ancient Wooden Sunken Boats

There are rich cultural heritages both underwater and in land in China, which is the object concerned by archaeologists and historic researchers, especially the ancient wooden sunken boats containing the past information of old human civlilization we can restore. Detections for buried magnetic massive metals and cement boats with magnetometry have been well perfected technically, but detection for wooden sunken boats has been seldom reported so far. This paper not only confirms that wooden boats can cause magnetic field variation, but also determines the property of field sources and preliminarily estimates the scale and buried depth of them, by means of the test and analysis to magnetic field caused by actual wooden boats. It is shown that detection ancient wooden boat with magnetic survey is feasible, reliable and effective. Finally, this paper introduces examples of detection boats with magnetic survey and briefly discusses the applicable conditions of detection ancient wooden boats with magnetometry, which can be used as reference for archaeologists. Keywords—wooden boat; magnetic field measurement; model test; field source estimation; application effect