Contribution of geoelectrical resistivity sounding for paleoenvironment assessment at Saft El-Henna and Tell El-Dab'a archaeological sites, eastern Nile Delta, Egypt

Vertical electrical sounding (VES), a resistivity sounding technique, has been applied at two important archaeological sites in the eastern part of the Nile Delta to trace the paleoenvironment, particularly the defunct canals. Like many other archaeological sites in the Nile Delta of Egypt, these two sites have been subjected to urbanisation and agricultural invasion from the local farmers. Therefore, studying the paleoenvironment is an important task for guiding the excavation process and highlighting the importance of these two archaeological sites. The VES stations were arranged to cover the two sites, in the form of traverse profiles for tracing the subsurface sand and gravel facies that intercalated with clay deposits. The acquired VES data were processed based on the available borehole lithological information for the purpose of establishing the resistivity-depth models. Both 1D and 2D processing schemes were applied to the VES data sets to increase the confidence of the obtained results. The clay and silt deposits are characterised by low resistivity values, whereas the sand facies has a relatively high resistivity character. From the constructed cross-sections at the two sites, it was possible to define a consistent character for the clay deposits, which can be inferred as the defunct canals that supplied water to the two sites.