Boots on the Ground and Planes in the Air: Assessing Damage to Archaeological Sites Caused by the 2011 Missouri River Floods

Summary

In the spring of 2011, the Missouri River Mainstem received unprecedented combination of snow melt and rain causing widespread flooding unseen since the construction of the Missouri River Dams. One of the consequences of the flooding was damage to archaeological sites located on the lands surrounding the reservoirs. As a result, South Dakota State Historical Society (SDSHS) partnered with the University of Arkansas Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST) to assess potential damages related to the flooding for the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). The SDSHS/CAST team developed a program that combined on-site erosion monitoring with the collection and ortherectification of historic aerial imagery, ground based geophysics, low level aerial photography, and high altitude remote sensing. This integrated approach incorporates a time-series of GPS data and aerial imagery with recently collected geophysical data providing a surface and near subsurface view of many sites damaged by the recent floods, providing assistance to the USACE in the management of these finite resources.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Those Dam Sites: Recent Archaeological Research in the Dakotas

Keywords

Spatial Coverage