The potentials of airborne geomagnetic survey systems for cultural resources management: Preliminary results of experimental geophysical investigations in eastern Hungary and central Arizona, USA

Summary

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

Simultaneous innovations in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and geophysical technologies present the possibility of a potentially groundbreaking approach to archaeological geophysics: airborne geophysical survey. As part of an ongoing effort on behalf of the Environmental Management Office of the Arizona Army National Guard to integrate conventional and remote sensing survey methods for cultural resources management, we conducted an exploratory project to assess the applicability of aerial geophysics for archaeological site detection and mapping. Using the Sensys MagDrone R4 survey system, we conducted large-scale surveys of two complex archaeological sites, a fortified Late Bronze Age settlement in eastern Hungary and an early Sedentary period Hohokam village site in the northern portion of the Florence Military Reservation in Pinal County, Arizona. In this paper we present our preliminary findings from multiple geophysical survey campaigns. We evaluated the airborne geophysical survey results in light of preceding pedestrian geophysical and conventional surveys. We also present a novel data processing approach using computational methods for the detection and classification of archaeologically relevant magnetic anomalies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41627.0