That time I used ground penetrating radar on a dig in Ohio and hit pay dirt

I was working on a site near Chillicothe that was supposed to be a small village site from the Hopewell period. We spent three days digging test pits and coming up with basically nothing but rocks. On a whim, I borrowed a GPR unit from a friend at the university and ran a grid over a spot that looked flat and boring on the surface. The radar picked up a clear circular anomaly about 3 feet down, and when we dug it we found a fire pit with pottery and burned deer bones. Has anyone else had luck using tech like GPR to find things you would have missed with traditional digging?

2 comments

2 Comments

sammoore18d ago

GPR is a crutch for people who didn't learn to read the ground properly. If you had spent more time looking at the surface features or checking the soil color changes, you probably would have found that fire pit anyway. The real skill in archaeology is knowing where to dig without needing a machine to tell you. Relying on GPR just means you're skipping the hard part of actually understanding the landscape. I'd rather trust three days of careful observation than a radar screen.

sammoore17d ago

...but here's the thing, I had a buddy who did archaeology for a state DOT crew. He told me about a site out in eastern Colorado where they spent a WEEK walking grids, looking at soil stains, checking every little bump and dip. Nothing. They brought in GPR for one afternoon and found a whole buried structure, like a small prehistoric house. The ground was so windblown and disturbed from farming that the surface features were basically useless. So I get being proud of your eye for the land, I really do. But sometimes the ground just doesn't cooperate, and a tool that can SEE through it is not a crutch, it's just a smarter way to work. You wouldn't tell a doctor to skip the x-ray because a good doctor can just feel for broken bones, right?