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?

3 comments

3 Comments

sammoore2mo 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.

sammoore2mo 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?

kimreed1mo ago

Wait, is this really that big of a deal, @sammoore? I mean, you spent a week walking grids and checking for stains, and a machine found it in an afternoon. That's not a crutch, that's just using a better tool for the job. It's like saying using a metal detector is a crutch because real archaeologists should just be able to spot a coin in the dirt with their naked eye. Sometimes the ground is just hiding things too deep or too messed up for surface signs to show, and GPR is just giving you a shortcut to the good stuff. I don't get why that's something to be mad about, honestly.