Spade & the Grave

death and burial through an archaeological lens


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Ground Penetrating Radar in search of Graves – Newfoundland Edition

This morning I thought it might be fun to talk about geophysical scanning techniques.

TorsCove_GPR1_3_RL

SmartCart with 500mhz antenna, GPR survey at Tors Cover, 2016. Photo by author.

If you are coming to this blog knowing about what I was up to in the field last year, or having read my CAA poster last week, you’ll know that I attempted a wide-scale Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) survey at Ferryland, Newfoundland, in May of 2016, with the help of our wonderful curator and GPR tech, Maria Lear. I was looking for anomalies in the results that could indicate a burial in the subsoil, either high-contrast anomalies that might suggest a coffin or coffin hardware or a depression or slump in the soil layers where a grave had settled over time. What were my results? We’ll get to that in a moment!

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