Finding Fort Clatsop: Results of Fresh Geophysical Surveys and GIS Integration of Past Data

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 2022, Washington State University archaeologists working in conjunction with the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation and the National Parks Service conducted a ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the famous Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Site— Fort Clatsop, Oregon— in a fresh attempt to locate the remains of the fort. Evidence associated with Lewis and Clark’s overwintering in the area has been located and documented, but the actual structural remains of Fort Clatsop have not yet been identified, despite several focused attempts to do so. Re-analysis of the Lewis and Clark journals by Glen Kirkpatrick suggested the fort may be in a different location than previously thought, and GPR survey was employed to evaluate the area. We present the results of the survey, which was conducted under both wet (spring) and dry (fall) conditions in order to increase chances of finding the fort palisade. Historic maps, past geophysical survey and excavation results, and current project GPR data were integrated into a GIS platform for analysis. In this poster we provide a fine-grained assessment as to whether the remains of the fort exist and can be found.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36372.0