Showerthought: I used to think ground-penetrating radar was just a fancy gimmick for big-budget digs.

I was helping on a local dig in Tucson last month, cataloging surface finds. The lead archaeologist brought in a GPR unit, and I rolled my eyes, thinking it was a waste of time and money compared to traditional test pits. We spent a morning doing test pits in a grid and found almost nothing. Then we ran the GPR over the same area. In about an hour, it clearly showed a buried adobe wall foundation and a cluster of anomalies about 80 cm down. We excavated right on the spots it marked and hit the features immediately. The test pits would have taken us weeks of random guessing to find that. It completely changed my view on non-invasive tech. For a site with limited time and budget, which method actually saves more resources in the long run?

3 comments

3 Comments

verac492mo ago

Cost is just one part of the bigger picture, right?

nathan8512mo ago

Okay, but how much did that radar thing cost though?

reese_perry61mo ago

Over here dropping $80,000 on a radar system for a boat that probably gets used twice a summer is wild to me. Like, are we planning to navigate through a hurricane or just trying to spot the nearest sandbar from a mile away? I get that safety is important, but sometimes this sub acts like every trip is a life or death mission.