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Had to pick between ground penetrating radar and old school test pits for a site survey last week | Archaeology Discoveries - nhfree.com

benk26•3mo ago

Had to pick between ground penetrating radar and old school test pits for a site survey last week

Spent 3 days digging test holes on a suspected Roman site near Brighton and found nothing, while the guy with the GPR scanned the whole field in 6 hours and pinpointed a foundation 4 feet down. Has anyone else dealt with the headache of trying to justify the cost of radar gear to a tight budget committee?

3 comments

3 Comments

verafoster3mo ago

Well how did the committee react when you showed them the GPR results vs your test pits? I bet that was a painful meeting, lol. I've seen this exact fight play out with a local historical society near me and they ended up renting a GPR for a weekend instead of buying one. Honestly I'm surprised you got any digging done in three days near Brighton, that chalky soil is brutal for hand digging in my experience. Did you have to deal with any "but we've always done it this way" bull from the older members on the budget team?

fisher.charlie3mo ago

I mean, I get where you're coming from @verafoster, but honestly, the committee was more curious than angry when we showed the GPR versus the test pits. The old timers definitely gave some side-eye about the "newfangled" GPR, but once we walked them through how the radar picked up those deeper anomalies that our pits missed, they kinda softened up. The chalky soil was a nightmare for hand digging, no argument there, but we had some younger volunteers who were happy to trade off every hour so nobody burned out completely. The "but we've always done it this way" thing did come up a couple times, but I just kept reminding everyone that adding one tool doesn't mean throwing out the old methods, you know? In the end, they agreed to rent a GPR for the next dig rather than buy one outright, which felt like a win to me.

wesley_thompson2mo ago

Wait, did @fisher.charlie end up doing a side by side comparison at the meeting showing the GPR data overlaid on the test pit results? That's what finally won over my local group when I had the same fight a couple years back. The old timers kept saying the radar was just a toy until we literally put the printouts on the table and they could see the big buried wall sections the pits completely missed. The chalky soil talk is real though, I remember swapping out every 45 minutes with a buddy just to keep our arms from falling off. We ended up renting a GPR for a season too, and by the end of it, the same guys who griped about it were asking if we could use it again.