March 27, 2009
GPR, ground penetrating radar, allows you to see subsurface features without digging.
It was invented in the seventies and used by the military for locating land mines and underground tunnels and that kind of thing. The archaeology community got interested in it more recently because it’s far less invasive and destructive.
The GPR unit shoots radio waves down into the ground to identify features and other anomalous objects, and the amount of time it takes for them to come back gives us depth and other information about underground features. When you push the unit across the ground, you get images in cross-sectional slices. It could be difficult to decode the display until, using the computer software, you put the slices together to produce a three-dimensional image. When you finally see something after all that time and effort, it’s so rewarding.
Even a lot of the larger schools in the state don’t have this kind of equipment, so that’s pretty exciting.
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