Archaeoseismology and Palaeoseismology in the Alpine ... - Tierra

earthquake patterns in our trenches, and to the lack of
dating.
The results of both logic trees applied on the Roman ruins
of Baelo Claudia, although they may not be comparable
that easily, differ significantly and indicate that the
archaeoseismological observations are more reliable than
the palaeoseismological ones in that special case. As a
stand‐alone technique, palaeoseismology would have to
deal with many uncertainties especially caused by the
limits of site selection and earthquake identification.
Archaeoseismology provides information that is more
detailed and achieves a higher certainty on distinct
events, but finds its weak points in regional correlation of
data. The combination of both methods and their
evaluation by the means of a logic tree lead to a higher
level of confidence and give a more particularized quality
estimation of the potential of an investigation site. Due to
the lack of similar studies and the absence of sufficient
numbers of PQFs and AQFs, the classification of our
results is finally not possible.
Acknowledgements: This study was financially supported by the
German Research Foundation (DFG‐project Re 1361/9). We thank
the Leibniz Institute at Kiel for radiocarbon dating and the Junta
de Andalucía for the permission to work inside the ruins of Baelo
Claudia and in the Gibraltar Strait National Park.
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Fig. 4: The Atakan et al. (2000) logic tree for Palaeoseismology consists of 12 branches and 6 nodes at which certain probabilities must be
defined. The result is the probability of the preferred end solution, Pes. In the study discussed here, Pes is 0.0093, 20 times lower than the
one achieved by Atakan et al. (2000) at the Bree Fault example. UNIPAS V3.0 automatically computes the Pes based on the values
entered and creates the graph.