One of the biggest barriers to the rapid spread of cutting edge, innovative technologies in archeology is cost.  Let’s face it: things that end in “-ometer” or “-oscopy” tend to be pricey.  And if they are really new, or if their utility in some contexts has yet to be proven, the price remains in the stratosphere [...]

Getting archeology onto the silver or flat screen has always been a tricky proposition: you have to entertain, but stick to the facts, all without encouraging site looting. One of the programs that seems to have done it, at least in the U.K., is Time Team. And now it’s coming to the U.S.

As Kris Hurst put it on her About.com blog, Time Team America “brings a Mission Impossible team of professional archaeologists to a different archaeological site in the United States,” where they spend “three days at each site, bringing along a raft of cutting edge remote sensing and geophysical survey techniques.”

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’.

The research reported herein focuses on developing and testing predictive models based on the satellite remote-sensing (SRS) of prehistoric and historic archaeological phenomena. With advances in the resolution of satellite-borne imagery, such as IKONOS, and the availability of software designed to process such imagery, such as ENVI, archaeological predictive modeling is positioned to progress beyond simplistic “indirect” correlational studies involving gross ecological categories or subjective landform designations.

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.