UXO Surveys or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Find the Bombs.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Needle, Meet Haystack: The Role of Magnetometers in Underwater Archaeological Research and the Evolution of Interpreting Magnetic Data for Cultural Resource Investigations", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

An ongoing common practice in the development of offshore wind projects along the coastal areas of the United States includes the study and derisking of UneXploded Ordinance (UXO) present in the surrounding environment. As past military conflicts shaped and changed the world's imaginary borders, real borders of ferrous (and non-ferrous) explosives remain untouched in the aquatic world below. What this means for users of the maritime world is an added risk of encountering these explosive anthropogenic remains either by physical impact or accidental recovery. As the world of construction and engineering development becomes safer and more mature, the acceptance of risks such as UXO to employees and contractors working on these projects becomes more and more conservative. In this paper, we will explore UXO surveys in the United States, and the tools we use to conduct them.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Needle, Meet Haystack: The Role of Magnetometers in Underwater Archaeological Research and the Evolution of Interpreting Magnetic Data for Cultural Resource Investigations

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Contact(s): Nicole Haddow