In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

15 Archaeological Remote Sensing Research in the Yazoo Basin A History and Evaluation Jay K. Johnson The following will be a broadly historical review of remote sensing applications in the archaeology of the Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV). By LMV, I mean the Mississippi River drainage from approximately the Missouri/ Arkansas line south, although I will be a little flexible in this definition, particularly in the early period. By remote sensing, I mean to include any technique that allows the near-surface of the earth to be characterized at a distance . Most people think of satellites when you mention remote sensing, but sometimes, in the case of many geophysical techniques, the sensor is at, on, or intruded into the surface of the earth but still measuring soil features that are remote from the instrument. The goal of this summary is to provide a general understanding of the factors involved in the development of these techniques and a set of recommendations for future applications. Beginnings Remote sensing in archaeology got off to a precocious beginning in Mississippi as a result of a fortunate set of circumstances. Mark Williams, with a brand new undergraduate degree in anthropology and a background in electronics , was stationed at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi during the early 1970s. His job as an instructor allowed him a good deal of free time in the afternoons , which he spent volunteering on local archaeology projects (Mark Williams , personal communication 2004). This included John Connaway and Sam McGahey’s search for Fort Maurepas in Ocean Springs. Mark and his father had been experimenting with building a soil-resistance meter suitable for archaeological prospection (Williams 1984) and Mark employed an early, twoprobe version of the device in the Fort Maurepas project. The project was frustrated by the fact that the most likely location for the fort is along a waterfront bluff line in Ocean Springs that had become prime real estate, with big houses Archaeological Remote Sensing Research in the Yazoo Basin / 345 and manicured lawns. Not everyone allowed excavation. It is situations like this where the nondestructive aspects of remote sensing become important. At one location,“Although no excavations were allowed, the use of a resistivity meter in the area suggested the presence of many subsurface features” (Connaway 1981a:65). A recent attempt to find the fort using geophysical survey techniques discovered patterns that are likely to be French and could possibly be part of the fort (Held 2004) but, once again, the ground-truth excavations necessary to evaluate the structure are not likely to happen. The first magnetometer survey in the Lower Valley was conducted in the Red River in 1975 in search of shipwrecks (GSRI 1975). There followed a large number of similar application as the Corps of Engineers funded dredging and bank stabilization throughout the region (Birchett and Pearson 1995; Irion et al. 1995; James 1994; Pearson et al. 1982; Pearson et al. 1992; Perrault et al. 1995; R. Christopher Goodwin and Associates 2000; Saltus 1977a, 1977b, 1979a, 1979b; Weinstein 1991). A progressive refinement of techniques is evident in these reports , most of which involve the use of more-and-more sophisticated locational devices, the addition of depth finders, and ultimately side-scan radar. Of course, these riverine surveys are not directly relevant to work focusing on terrestrial resources, even when that work is restricted to filled-in oxbows and the recordings are made by mounting the magnetometer on a staff and walking the survey area. This is due primarily to the nature of the archaeological resource targeted. Most of the shipwrecks in the rivers of the Lower Valley date to the nineteenth century and contain large amounts of metal. This means that relatively large deflections of the magnetic field can be expected, and the effects of drift and instrument height do not need to be considered. In fact, in terrestrial applications, the sensor was generally elevated up to 1.8 meters above ground surface in order to reduce the sensitivity to small and near-surface metal artifacts. On the survey that successfully located the wreck of the gunboat U.S.S. Eastport, the sensor head was suspended below a helicopter on a nylon ski rope (Birchett and Pearson 1995). The primary importance of these riverine surveys is that the same instruments were sometimes used to survey prehistoric and Historic sites on land. At about the same time, another promising young archaeologist was experimenting with geophysical instruments on archaeological sites. Vincas Steponaitis , then a...

Share