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The time I laughed at a friend for swearing by ground-penetrating radar in Kansas
Back in 2012, a buddy of mine from grad school kept going on about this GPR unit he rented for a survey in a farmer's field outside Lawrence. I was doing traditional shovel tests at the time and figured radar was just fancy guesswork that cost too much. He let me tag along one afternoon, and we marked off a grid near an old creek bed. The screen showed this weird rectangular blob about 2 feet down, and I told him it was probably a rock or a pipe. Well, we dug it anyway, and it turned out to be the foundation of a mid-1800s cabin nobody had recorded. No records, no maps, just that blob on a screen. Now I rent a GPR myself maybe once a year for tricky sites, and I feel dumb for how long I doubted it. Has anyone else eaten crow on a piece of tech they dismissed at first?
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price.alice22d ago
Wait, have you ever had a tool you wrote off totally come back and make you look like a complete fool? I had the same thing happen with a cheap metal detector my buddy brought to a site in Iowa. I laughed him off at first, saying it was just for beachcombers looking for pennies. Then he waved it over this overgrown patch near an old river crossing and got a solid hit. We dug down maybe 18 inches and pulled out a rusted horse bit from the 1870s, a total surprise because nobody had written anything about that crossing existing. Now I borrow his detector every fall for testing those weird spots I'd normally ignore, and it's found me two more good spots for bottle dumps.
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Had a buddy who laughed at LIDAR back when it was first getting used for archaeology. Told me it was just a fancy way to find trees. Then he ran a survey over a wooded area in Missouri and found a whole network of wagon trails from the 1800s that nobody could see from the ground. He printed out the map and went hiking with it, found ruts still cut into the bedrock under all that leaf litter. Now he's the guy who brings his own drone to every field school.
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