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1 Introduction JayK.Johnson This book began in a conversation between Marco Giardino and me at the bar in Fitzgerald’s Casino during the summer of 2001. The bar top was embedded with video gaming screens and we had worked out a system whereby it took us nearly two hours to lose $10.00 playing blackjack. All that time we were supplied with “free” beer. Before going any further, I should mitigate this revelation by pointing out that Fitzgerald’s Hotel was the field headquarters for the Ole Miss field school that year. We were working on the Hollywood Mounds, a large, late prehistoric ceremonial center at which geophysical survey techniques, particularly gradiometry and conductivity, have proven remarkably effective. Marco was working with us, wrestling with the much more dif- ficult job of getting informative results from ground-penetrating radar (GPR) in the clays and silts of the Mississippi alluvial valley. We were bemoaning the lack of application of these techniques in Southeastern archaeology in general and cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology in particular . As the chapters that follow will demonstrate, remote sensing, especially the geophysical techniques, has reached the point where it can make a substantial contribution to the dirt archaeology of the Southeast. However you frame the argument, whether in terms of refining the research design or of cost effectiveness, on most sites, the application of remote sensing early on in the fieldwork will lead to better results. However, on some sites you might as well leave the instruments in the truck. One of the goals of this volume is to help CRM administrators integrate remote sensing into their data-recovery programs in an informed way. 2 ~ Jay K. Johnson But, back to Fitzgerald’s. We decided that many of the archaeologists working in the South were not aware of the remarkable advances in remote sensing applications that have occurred during the past 10 years and that what was needed was a workshop on remote sensing applications in archaeology. Marco secured funds through his office, NASA’s Earth Science Applications Directorate at Stennis Space Center; I found additional support from the University of Mississippi Geoinformatics Center; and a workshop was planned for the Wednesday preceding the annual meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC), which was held in Biloxi, Mississippi , in 2002. I got on the phone to my friends in remote sensing and in a short time assembled the impressive list of instructors represented in the following chapters. That was followed by the much more demanding task of locating and inviting the state archaeologists , state historic preservation officers, and chief highway archaeologists or their representatives from the 11 states that are traditionally represented in the SEAC membership. We planned to begin the workshop with a field trip to Tullis-Toledano Manor, a historic site in Biloxi, where there would be demonstrations of the various instruments. The afternoon would be devoted to presentations on the several major remote sensing techniques appropriate to archaeology. A reception was planned for the evening, during which we would talk about all that we had done that day. The workshop was a success. Many of the participants expressed an interest in applying the techniques and, in fact, several were from state agencies that were already using some of the instruments. The presentations were all quite good. So good, in fact, that we decided to follow up with a one-day workshop just for the instructors in which we would work on preparing a handbook on remote sensing applications for CRM archaeologists. We met in the French Quarter in New Orleans at the Royal Sonesta Hotel and spent another very successful day talking about the focus of the publication. Then came the hard part: finding the time to fulfill the commitments we had made and actually writing the following chapters. Although the workshop was presented to archaeologists working in the Southeast, the instructors work throughout North America and the volume reflects this broader perspective. For this and other reasons, I am pleased with the results, but, of course, the final judgment will be up to the readers. I would like to address one fundamental question, however. Was such a volume needed? There are, after all, several very good summaries of remote sensing applications in archaeology (Aitken 1961; Bevan 1998; Clark 1996; Gaffney and Gater 2003; Scollar et al. 1990), most of which have the same emphasis on geophysics that is evident in the following pages. However...

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