New Philadelphia, Illinois was the first town platted and legally registered by an African American in the United States. Founded by Frank McWorter, a former slave, in 1836, this town grew as a demographically integrated community through the late nineteenth century. The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT) awarded funding of $14,800 to test the usefulness of low-altitude aerial surveys employing high resolution thermal imaging at New Philadelphia.

The success of this technique will provide an extremely useful resource for applications on numerous similar sites throughout the nation.

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.”