Dry stone retaining structures are structures made of individual decimeter stone blocks in contact. One advantage of this construction technology lies in the weak amount of embodied energy required for their construction, and uses only local materials. This technology may be a positive answer to the challenges brought by sustainable policies in civil engineering.

Many of these structures are older than one hundred years and sustain damage due to ageing; this places the owners in front of a challenging issue. Usual scientific tools cannot address the specific behavior of such...