Remote Sensing Survey at Spring Lake, San Marcos, TX

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Spring Lake forms the headwaters of the San Marcos River. The area surrounding the lake has hosted prehistoric peoples since the Paleoindian era and remains a place of cultural reverence for contemporary Indigenous communities. In the early 20th century, an amusement park, hotel, and golf course were built around the lake which brought thousands of patrons to the area for decades until its eventual sale to Texas State University (TXST). Today TXST oversees its preservation and conservation, as well as education and research initiatives related to this important resource. To understand evidence of the history of the anthropogenic landscape preserved in buried contexts at one of several archaeological sites associated with the lake, 41HY160, we used a 400-megahertz Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to detect surface and subsurface anomalies and GPR-SLICE to analyze resulting geospatial data. We present our reconstruction of the historic golf course and discuss the impact of the course’s features and infrastructure on archaeological deposits. Conclusions will summarize the utility of this data and approach to archaeological research at Spring Lake.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39849.0