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I always thought those fancy ground-penetrating radar surveys were a waste until our dig in Virginia turned up nothing for 3 weeks straight
Dropped $1,200 on a GPR scan over a suspected colonial-era burial site and it found the foundation outlines in under 2 hours, which saved our entire grant-funded season from being a total bust.
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emmasmith8d agoTop Commenter
Have you ever looked into how GPR actually works compared to traditional survey methods? I remember reading an article from the Colonial Williamsburg foundation a few years back that explained how their scans picked up subtle soil changes the human eye would miss entirely. @wilson.claire, I get the skepticism, but think of it like this - sometimes the difference between finding a trash pit and a foundational wall is all about the data you gather before you break ground. Those $1,200 scans have saved a lot of good archaeology from becoming an expensive hole in the ground.
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wilson.claire8d ago
Twelve hundred bucks to find a couple of old bricks? Sounds like we're paying for a metal detector with a college degree. But hey, at least your grant season didn't end with you digging up a rusty tractor part and calling it a historical artifact. Next time you'll probably have to rent a psychic to find the other half of the foundation.
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