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Pioneer Settlement along the Red River
An Archeological Examination of a Mid-to-late 18th Century Colonial Homestead
November 14, 2017
Magnolia, AR
 Tad Britt, RPA, is Chief of Archeology and Collections at NCPTT. Past experiences include serving as a Senior Researcher at the US Army Corps of Engineers, Construction Engineering Research Laboratory, Champaign, IL. He has extensive experience in program management and has developed several technologies that have cross-disciplinary applications. |
 Amy Broussard, co-author of the report, was a 2017 intern with Britt, from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. |
In this study, a mid-to-late 18th century colonial homestead associated with Athanase De Meziere, a key gure in Louisiana and Texas history, is reexamined and new interpretations are presented. This study expands on the previous investigations by revisiting the site and augmenting conventional archeological methods with a metal detector survey.
This comparative study demonstrates the e ciency of using metal detector technology at historic homesteads. The artifacts recovered from this investigation were compared to the previous artifact assemblages from the site, demonstrating:
- the potential for metal detecting to yield more information than traditional gridded-interval archeological methodology;
- the potential for metal detecting to yield more than only metal artifacts if excavated properly; and
- the efficacy of metal detecting at a non-battlefield archaeological site.
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 Ryan Ware and Tad Britt metal detecting.
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 Nails recovered from the site. |