 Thank you ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to talk about the Helmau Mount in Central Poland. This is the work of a team of collaborators of Jezo Cittore, who was the leader of the project, because he was responsible for geomorphology and geochemistry and myself for the geophysics. This slide you can see how the area looks from an aerial view. It's a really impressive hill for the area of Central Poland which is relatively flat and there's a scene from far away, a really impressive forested hill that imposes itself over 200 meters on the area around it. It's seen from quite far away and this place has been a subject of archaeological interest as it is home to a hill fort or a stronghold which is dated to the early medieval. As you can see, we started this project over here because of cultural heritage management regions as it's a really important and quite original archaeological site in the area, but not much is known about it except that it exists and unfortunately it has fallen to chlorine which is visible in these areas over here and you can see how the chlorine and forestation of this area has been going on at least since the 1940s on this as you can see on this archival picture, aerial picture. Basically it's a really big problem because this is quite an extensive area, quite a large archaeological site and the quarrying is quite serious. It's going on, it's still taking place and it's expanding so we need to do something to see if the areas that are potentially liable for quarrying perhaps need some form of legal protection as an archaeological monument. We started this research from acquiring lidar data as is I guess the most typical and the method that opened woodlands to Polish archaeologists since it appeared for free on the internet and caught everyone by surprise. You can have this data has been acquired for for non-archeological purposes, the entire country's can now probably many people will be talking about it so I won't go into details and the point cloud was visualized, created a DEM and visualized and of course I guess depending on who you are if you're a more of a geography type of person you'll probably see the really visible quarrying over here and if you're an archaeologist you'll probably notice the impressive quite impressive rapids and quite well preserved. The central one towering over well three meters in the terrain which is quite a rare thing because most hill forts and strongholds from this in this area are in lowlands and they have been subject to destruction plowing and various other agro-technical activities which have influenced their state of preservation. This is not the case here and in fact even before any any fieldwork was started the new data the amount of new data arriving from this lidar data set was was extremely huge as we can see a few in this area, a few other previously unknown delimitations, fortifications however you may call them where we're not noticed by us. This is a quite an important place in the history of Poland as it has been described by the Polish famous Polish chronicle Janusz Lwogelius and he names this place as a important important center of administration of the of the Polish early medieval Polish state and in fact even even now even until recently it's been used in it has even a symbolical meaning it's quite an interesting place if you go there it's a bit magical maybe that's not too scientific but it's really interesting quiet and special place and just at the base of these ramparts and you get rock carvings made by people from the 19th century asking god to give Poland buckets independence so it was a place of pilgrimage of various people praying for for various stuff before before this project it was studied by rescue excavations of Janina Kaminska which were she basically was looking for the chronological differentiation of the area which is always was a really important aspect of studying hillforts in strongholds and she noted in some limited small-scale really small-scale excavations in the chronicle stratigraphy that she proposed two phases of the hillfort from the 10th century 11th to 13th century Jerzy Sikora in 2004 and 2005 before the invention of Ilar was interested in this place and also did some field walking that revealed previously unknown outer outer ramparts this has been a part of a larger program that we have been conducting with this team since 2013 I think and this was started in 2013 and it encompassed this the study of the topic of medieval strongholds and hillforts in the area of central Poland and this was a non-invasive project with the use of non-invasive methods remote sensing geophysics field walking geochemistry etc and some more light visualizations which are quite important in the differentiation of archaeological features because what most people use are hill shaded DEMs which are quite good but in the context of terrain forms that have high changes in the topography the hill shades have this quite serious drawback that they the artificially created shadow obscures certain features in the shadows and special areas located on on slopes so we also have been using generally open source software for crew after acquiring the data cloud the point cloud for creation of DEM models in this case are done in saga and also in a really visualization toolbox which is really a really a great tool and just a comparison why this why we chose this area as topic of our presentation is indeed the medieval strongholds in this area and generally are quite so relatively small features this is all in one scale as you can see this is the the Mount Helmow stronghold which is a really impressive and really quite a landscape feature which is quite suitable for large-scale non-invasive perspective but there is one problem doing the lidar doing all the field walking is a really great thing and it has opened us for woodland archaeology which was previously a blank area for for Polish archaeologists basically and I remember doing surveys in heavy forested areas before lidar and basically even if someone is really good in the field it's getting lost is quite easy but there's another problem because our program of non-invasive research of these filipers included geophysics and this is quite quite some time ago maybe perhaps it won't be to it won't be not true if we say what a big pioneering is for that and not a lot of large-scale geophysics were done in forested areas generally a really difficult area for geophysics which is really important to remember because you've got lots of sources of noise and lots of sources that do not allow you to carry out the surveys in a continuous manner which I think is the most important thing for the geophysical results is that the results are not one small area over here one small area over there is there in the continuity and this was indeed the problem here and I just like to note that it's really important to choose the right time of year because our first attempt at this area was in May of 2013 which was not a good idea because it basically didn't look like this at the time I guess and there wasn't Vietnam but that's the way I imagine it looked and nothing could be done and fortunately we had the the ledger of postponing that and now you can see it basically at the end of November yeah at the end of November so at the end of November it actually quite well was quite nice doing these surveys the trees if they're not too dense they're not really a big problem for doing the measurements the biggest problem in my opinion are the small kind of bushes and those kind of areas but fortunately even though this is a protected area protected ecological area these can be cut out so I guess it's really important to choose the right time of year and the right kind of preparation in order to do this there's the results encompassing over five hectares of magnetic radiometry which is this method used with a small scale sensor just like to add that in geophysics there's now a fashion and really good progress progressive thing happening that people are having more and more sensors with mobile mobilized hearts and stuff like that you won't really get to use that in a forest so handheld systems are also quite a good idea to use and these are the results which I'd like to just quickly go over and the question is usually at that time when we were doing the surveys a lot of people were asking us yeah but why are you doing everything is no we can see the ramparts we can see everything and that was that's a question that appears quite often not only in areas with visible topography but generally with regards to geophysics and I can say that it was really really worth it we didn't know what will happen because that's usually a question that appears how do you think the survey will go and the right answer you should give is I don't know we will see and we saw that our work really really paid off lots of interesting data not only from a purely archaeological perspective but we can see that the noisy background of the bedrock shallow bedrock which is an important piece of information for us to note that there's a lot of the background is magnetic so there might not be a lot of contrasts the most important aspect of this research was in fact that even though the most prevalent data was from the ramparts we actually got to see the construction within the magnetic data of how they were created and calibrating this information with a lot of excavations from similar medieval ramparts we could propose basically perhaps how these ramparts were created and with what material of course there were some features that are not too clearly visible but for instance this kind of outline enclosure over here which is not a terrain form it's a purely sub subterranean feature which is not previously known and some areas that suggest the sunken features which was one of the big questions and generally a big research question regarding the teleports were they used were they used as constant habitation in settlements or were they used for defensive purposes or ritual purposes because there's not a lot of pottery found there and also other landscape features which you can't really register in any other method that which didn't really come out really that well in other methods which are visible here linear feature really really small amplitude anomalies that lead to certain areas that we propose there are dates and this is the zoom in on this area so these are this is the area of the outline ramparts that were previously unknown there's quite a challenge to do these measurements over here because of a slope and this area started looking more getting lots of you know low vegetation over here so and the really dangerous area where you could easily kill yourself if you wanted to or not wanted to even of the creeping endangering and destructive force of the contemporary and historical quarry we also tried some earth resistance which is a different method as you can see a lot of features were discovered over here all these black spots for the lower visibility areas these are actually this is a really big problem and in the woodland survey with this method of earth resistance is that this is actually the root system of trees which I guess it must be really interesting for people who study trees but maybe not exactly correct this is a form of noise so that was a really big problem taking all of this into account we created an integrated geophysical dataset so creating a kind of landscape approach to it with other features that could be read out from this data in potential guard towers so from and geochemistry provided really interesting results with a simplified field method of phosphate analysis which showed that in fact the phosphate was quite high which suggested a constant adaptation of this area the pottery which due to the lack of plowing was not too visible on this area was not to you didn't create a comprehensive dataset that really didn't put anything significant into our study but this was carried out nonetheless and this is the our summary of what we know based on only on purely and solely geophysical approaches to the area as a as a personal note this was a this survey was quite a challenge and there were a lot of questions being asked what will happen what will be done there's also if you take geophysical a number of ways of handbooks some people even write it you can't do geophysics in the forest and I guess not because it's legal and they will shoot you but that it's impossible due to the terrain obstacles so I guess the important lesson of the lesson we learned is that you have to be kind of elastic you these preconceptions that we have of various methods are quite important we should treat them seriously but each place requires a specific approach and this approach even despite that it was a challenge yielded a new interpretation a really significant amount of archaeologically sensitive data and important data for the heritage management of this area and perhaps better protection and basically it gave us a lot more than those small-scale excavations in the 50s that were carried out but again in the 50s these possibilities didn't exist thank you for your attention