Twenty-First-Century Archeological Geophysics in the National Park Service

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Midwest Archeological Center (National Park Service) has long been at the forefront of geophysical surveys for archeological research and heritage management in the United States. Since the Center’s pioneering efforts to showcase the practicality of geophysical methods nearly 50 years ago, our use of ground-based surveys has become indispensable for documenting, understanding, and preserving archeological resources. I will discuss significant findings from recent projects to illustrate how geophysical surveys facilitate communication with our partners and the public and also inform our understandings of the past. These case studies include (1) our use of GIS methods and spatial statistics to create intuitive visualizations of gradiometry survey results at a multicomponent Woodland site in Iowa significantly impacted by decades of cultivation; (2) a multi-instrument survey at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to identify the remnants of a historic community forced to move following the Dayton Flood of 1913, a site of considerable interest to resource managers and the local public; and (3) our assessment of the National Historic Landmark designation of an Initial Coalescent fortified village in South Dakota based on a gradiometry survey, the results of which also reveal new information with historical implications for the site’s fifteenth-century occupants.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32829