NCPTT

Prospection in Depth 2009, a course in archaeological geophysics, will be hosted from August 4-8, 2009 in partnership with the Presidio Trust at the site of El Presidio de San Francisco, in California. Register for this course online.

When organizing the Remote Site Surveillance meeting held last year, in August of 2008, one of the things I hoped to do was spark discussion about the administrative sustainability of surveillance/monitoring programs…

As part of our Remote Site Surveillance event in August of 2008, which I’ve mentioned in the prior two blog posts, we are working to enhance the joint U.S. Forest Service-Louisiana Army National Guard’s “Site Vulnerability Assessment Model.”

Back in Blog 2, “Turning the Wheel…,” I was tracing the strange but true link between methamphetamines and antiquities theft. Turns out I’m not the only person with this on their mind.

NCPTT’s David W. Morgan and Jason Church presented preliminary results of portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) analysis of copper at the joint Louisiana Archaeological Society and Mississippi Archaeological Association meeting held from February 27-March 1, 2009 in Natchez, Miss.

Katrina, 9-11, and “other challenges mean the preservation of our historic resources…requires innovative and proactive approaches during the coming decades” (Preserve America p5). That, I think, is where our remote archaeological site surveillance event comes into its own, especially when you consider how clearly antiquities trade, narcotics trafficking, and terrorism are becoming linked.

In 2006 the White House launched Preserve America. Parallel to this, on a much tinier scale, was an event on the use of surveillance equipment for remote archaeological site surveillance. In its own humble fashion this little cog actually helps turn the enormous Preserve America wheel.

Texas Tech University and CyArk have produced a webinar to train Vanishing Treasures personnel in the use of High Definition tools in archeology.

The Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) will hold its annual conference entitled “The Ties That Divide: Trade, Conflict & Borders” from January 6-11, 2009 in Toronto, ON, Canada.

Current Archaeological Prospection Advances for Non-Destructive Investigations in the 21st Century. There is a registration charge of $475.00

A new preservation technique involving the use of supercritical fluids to dry waterlogged archaeological wood will be investigated and compared to current preservation treatments.

This project will devise protocols for the fusion of commercially available synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data with commercially available multispectral data for the inventory of archaeological sites.

Archaeologists have been using aerial photography and satellite imagery to locate and document large, high-contrast archaeological features since inception. But, what about smaller, low-contrast features utilized by past humans such as root patches and terrace cobble deposits?

Montana Preservation Alliance proposes to create a digital archive of the rich cultural landscape that is the Tongue River Valley.

Existing conditions documentation of archaeological structures can be cut by 60% and can improve the accuracy and fidelity of the documentation by using scanning technology. This would optimize valuable human and financial resources for archaeologist and preservation specialist working to save our ‘Vanishing Treasures’.

We propose to determine whether predictive models that are based on the remotely-sensed characteristics of known archaeological phenomena can be used to forecast reliably the occurrence of unknown archaeological phenomena.

The Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) has hosted a competition each year since 1991 for the most outstanding paper submitted by a student about the prehistory, ethnohistory, or historical archaeology of the Southeast.

The “Prospection in Depth” course, currently in its second iteration, offers a new approach to archaeological pedagogy, incorporating multiple geophysical techniques, hands-on equipment use, and data collection at genuine archaeological sites.

Hurricane Katrina and its massive destruction drew attention to the commonplace markers on the landscape that create sense of place for a community.

Sediments used to build earthworks break down into identifiable soil horizons over time. Previous and on-going studies show that older earthworks have a more developed soil sequence with a well defined and thick accumulation of clay.