Applying Simple Magnetic Depth Estimation Techniques to Archaeo-geophysics

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Magnetometry is probably the most widely used archaeo-geophysical technique in the world, despite its major drawback of an absence of depth information to an anomalous source. Many users, novices in particular, are under the impression that magnetometry does not or cannot provide depth information. Yet, depth estimation techniques are commonly utilized in geologic studies. This study applies multiple depth estimation techniques to modeled and real-world data collected at an archaeological test site and from multiple sites in Tennessee. They include the half-width rules and multi-height gradient techniques. As current archaeo-geophysical software is not capable of depth estimation procedures, these advanced methods were coded in the Python programming language to yield processing software that has been made available to other users. The potential benefits of deriving depth information to magnetic sources is discussed in the context of testing a variety of anthropological and archaeological hypotheses.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23606