THE USE OF FT-IR AND COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY NON-DESTRUCTIVE TECHNIQUE FOR WATERLOGGED WOOD CHARACTERISATION

The archaeological wooden oak piles of medieval "Poznan" bridge, situated at the bottom of Lednica Lake in Greater Poland, are a valuable relic of the beginnings of the Polish country. The assessment of the state of wood preservation will allow to propose the most appropriate conservation agents and methods in order to save this cultural heritage. The aim of the study was to evaluate the degree of degradation of waterlogged piles by using traditional and non-destructive testing methods and to estimate the usefulness of non-destructive FT-IR and computed tomography techniques in such an assessment. The applied traditional, destructive methods, like chemical and physical, as well as non-destructive ones, like X-ray CT or FT-IR, showed that the archaeological oak wood elements are quite well preserved, especially their heartwood part. The obtained results clearly confirm that the modern X-ray CT measurement and FT-IR analysis can be very useful in archaeological wood research, giving a good insight into wood structure.