Radar

A Cornell research scientist, working in partnership with an organization representing a consortium of 20 Native Alaska groups, used.

“I think the Native community is really trying to deal with a long-standing wound, a historical trauma, and in this particular instance they’re using the tools of archaeology – broadly speaking, because archaeology is not just about excavation, it’s also about using noninvasive ways to determine information.” “They’re saying exactly what they want to have done, and the data will be in their control. Among those applications, a model was trained from a large number of burial scenarios for the purpose of efficiently sifting through anomalies in radar data to identify likely burials. “Ground-penetrating radar has been used to investigate burial sites for a long time,” Urban said. Leading the effort is Thomas Urban, research scientist in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), who has been conducting archaeological and paleontological research across the national park system in Alaska for the last decade. Over the course of several days last summer, Urban used ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to survey Pilgrim Hot Springs’s fenced-in cemetery – which features very few grave makers – and the surrounding area.