The research focus of this project is the development of powerful new analytical approaches that demonstrate the effectiveness of non-invasive archaeological methods and the deployment of tools that offer an opportunity to recover a great deal of information about site content while reducing costs associated with traditional archaeological survey and excavation.Exploration and assessment of the benefits of combining a large suite of ground, aerial and space-based sensor data for the detection of subsurface archaeological features is central to this research.

State-of-the-art remotely sensed data will be acquired at DoD installations Fort Bliss, Fort Benning, and Fort Riley, and at the DoE Savannah River Site. New and existing data from these installations will be complemented with existing site data from two additional locations, Whistling Elk and Mt. Comfort. These properties, selected on the basis of cultural resource inventory, physical conditions (soils, vegetation), and degree of recent disturbance, contain a wide variety of archaeological sites in various natural environments. Remotely sensed data will be analyzed individually and in combination via a variety of innovative data fusion approaches, to make predictions about the nature of buried historic resources.A program of archaeological field testing will be undertaken to validate predictions made during the data analysis phase.

The results of this research program will generate knowledge about the predictive effectiveness of sensors individually and together, describe the nature of the similarities, differences, redundancies, and performance characteristics of the sensors, provide a cost-benefit analysis, identify the kinds of archaeological features that may be detected with each method or combination of methods under various environmental conditions, and recommend enhancements to current GPR technologies for archaeological applications. The project will additionally develop a digital soils data model that will allow installation managers to predict the potential usability of sensors at various locations on their properties. The diverse research team includes university (University of Arkansas, Fayetteville), corporate (SRI and GeoScan), and government (Construction Engineering Research Labs and NASA) cooperators with archaeological, geophysical, aerial and space remote sensing, geocomputational, and managerial expertise.

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