Ground Penetrating Radar Survey of a Cemetery: Interpretation

Andy Bobyarchick, UNC Charlotte

This activity is part of the On the Cutting Edge Peer Reviewed Teaching Activities collection. (view details)

This activity was selected for the On the Cutting Edge Reviewed Teaching Collection

This activity has received positive reviews in a peer review process involving five review categories. The five categories included in the process are

Scientific Accuracy
Alignment of Learning Goals, Activities, and Assessments
Pedagogic Effectiveness
Robustness (usability and dependability of all components)
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Initial Publication Date: July 24, 2012 | Reviewed: November 3, 2013 (see revision history: 2 events)

Summary

This activity is an interpretation of a ground penetrating radar (GPR) data set collected from a 19th century slave cemetery in North Carolina.

Paleoecology , Event-Specific Items | College Lower (13-14), College Upper (15-16), Graduate/Professional

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Context

Audience

This activity is appropriate for an applied geophysics or geoforensics course for geology, earth sciences, and archaeology majors. It can also be integrated with a graduate class in those areas or as a data collection class to also include civil and environmental engineering students.

Skills and concepts that students must have mastered

Understand the basic concepts of radar and fundamentals of basic software processing to get the data to an interpretable stage.

How the activity is situated in the course

This activity can be used as a separate lab or extended lab project, or as the final part of a data collection, processing, and interpretation extended project. As such it could occupy most of a semester.

Goals

Content/concepts goals for this activity

Objective: Use GPR as part of a geoforensic investigation to locate graves in an abandoned and/or unmarked cemetery.
Goals: Understand the social/anthropological application of geophysics; characterize GPR signature of burials vs. other anomalies; point vs. planar radar signatures; signal processing and analysis.

Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity

Derive a conclusion from remote data collection and inference. Distinguish significant as opposed to extraneous signals in geophysics. Relate data analysis to collection and interpretation.