The seasonal high water table occurs usually some 1.22 m to 1.83 m below the ground surface from December to April, usually well below the depth of the plantation’s archaeological features. During the 2006 Prospection in Depth course the weather was dry, but during the 2007 course it rained most afternoons [Figure Natural 5], leaving remote sensing teams to contend with puddles and presumably an unseasonably high water table. The damp soils were beneficial to electrically-based geophysics techniques, but they posed special challenges to interpreting radar data.
Funding for the research project from 2002-2007 was generously provided by the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, the Cane River National Heritage Area, the National Park Service’s Delta Initiative, and the Institute of Archaeology at University College London.