Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Semesters End - Poster Session

In my class, ANTH 453/553 Archaeological Field Research Design, students prepared posters as a final project. These posters were done individually and as small groups of 2. The subject of the posters, of course, was the geophyisica/remote sensing archaeological field work done at Zzyzx during the semester.


Overall, I was happy with the work the students did. Generating a product out of the field work was much harder, I think, than what most of the students had anticipated. Much of the difficulty comes from the many different kinds of software packages needed to turn raw geophysical data into a final product. These included GPR-SLICE (the premier program for processing radar data for archaeology), MagMap 2000 (the free but powerful program for importing and processing magnetometry/resistivity data from Geometrics), NAV38B, the relatively crappy DOS based conductivity processing program from Geonics, ArcGIS, Golden Software's Surfer, PTGui (the best photomosaicing program I've found yet - absolutely key for generating mosaics from blimp photographs), Neosys Transform, Trimble GPS Pathfinder Office (for data transfer, conversion and post processed differential correction), ACD Systems Canvas, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and probably one or more other utilities I forgot to mention.


None of these packages are difficult in and of themselves, but there is a lot to futz around with. At any rate, I think the posters came out fine in the end and the results are interesting and useful.




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You can download the posters here:


- Project Overview (SBR-0363c SBR-5417)


- SBR-0363c Burial Study (Mag, GPR, Resistivity, Conductivity)


- SBR-5417 Conductivity and Resistivity


- SBR-5417 GPR and Magnetometry