• PDF / 3,917,103 Bytes
• 23 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
• 65 Downloads / 239 Views

DOWNLOAD

REPORT

---

Interpreting West Ashcom: Drones, Artifacts, and Archives Liza Gijanto 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract Archaeology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland began looking for the former homestead of West Ashcom in the Spring of 2012. West Ashcom was established on the south bank of the Patuxent River in what is now St. Mary’s County, MD by John Ashcom in 1651. At its height in the early eighteenth century it contained a manor house, kitchen, dairy, orchard, port, haberdashery, and various other barns and dependencies. Using traditional sources such as archives and methods like pedestrian surveys and surface collections, a late seventeenth/early eighteenth-century site was identified in a plowed field. Since then, archaeologists from SMCM have employed a range of sources, field methods, and mapping techniques to define the parameters of the site, past structures, and identify activity areas in a largely compromised area. This paper summarizes the results of more traditional uses of GIS mapping paired with experimental drone data to demonstrate the benefit of mixing old and new technologies when interpreting sites subject to continuous plowing and planting. Keywords Chesapeake . Mapping . Spatial analysis . Photogrammetry

Introduction Archaeologists working in the Chesapeake (Riordan 1988) and other areas of the world where sites have been subject to long-term mechanical plowing face unique challenges in investigating and documenting archaeological resources (e.g., O’Brien and Lewarch 1981; Odell and Cowan 1987; Roper 1976; Shott 1995). Not least of these is the modest disturbance to near destruction of in situ features. The subsurface destruction resulting from cultivation has generated surface assemblages that vary in size (re. both of the extent of the artifact scatter and the size of the artifacts) and integrity. A

* Liza Gijanto [email protected]

1

St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Department of Anthropology, 47645 College Drive, St. Mary’s City, MD 20686-3001, USA

International Journal of Historical Archaeology

noteworthy challenge for the archaeologist is understanding the potential relationship between the surface deposits generated through plowing and subsurface materials that may remain. In addition to site disturbance, archaeologists working in active agricultural areas must grapple with the impact of plowing on their methodology including the reliability of the site grid. In recent years, the availability of affordable, high quality drone and photographic technology has allowed for changes in methodology to mitigate these factors. The overall goal of this paper is to present a series of methods designed to address issues of site documentation and interpretation in such circumstances. The act of relocating secondary datums and resetting each field season has proven to be a challenge that has been partially mitigated through multiple mapping techniques including the use of a Leica total station, handheld GPS units, and more recently drones. These challenges ar