Archaeology Without Shovels
Larry Conyers, an associate professor of anthropology at DU, has searched for military and ancient graves in Hawaii, mapped tortoise burrows in central Florida, analyzed the La Brea tar pits, and researched 5,000-year-old pit-house villages on the Oregon coast, not to mention worked on sites in Scotland, Israel, Tunisia and Peru.
And that was just in 2005.
"That's the wonderful thing about doing this kind of high-tech research," Conyers says. "You're in demand. You get called to all kinds of interesting places."
Seeing underground
Conyers has been using ground-penetrating radar (GPR) at archaeological sites for more than 15 years. GPR emits radar waves into the ground and records data about how the waves are reflected back. By analyzing the data with computer programs, Conyers can figure out the shape and characteristics of buried objects and buildings without doing any digging.
Conyers was one of the first people to use GPR in archaeology, and he's still one of just a few archaeologists in the world who specialize in it.
"When most archaeologists think of GPR, they think of Larry Conyers and DU," says Jeffrey Quilter, deputy director for curatorial affairs at the Peabody Museum, Harvard, and a colleague of Conyers'.
With Conyers as a faculty member, DU has gained a unique position in the world of archaeology. "DU is the only institution of higher learning that has GPR as such an essential and important a part of its program," Quilter says.
Students doing worldwide research
Because of their specialized training, many of Conyers' students get to conduct field research at far-flung historical sites.
Jennie Sturm, who earned her MA in anthropology in 2006, spent two months working in northern Peru. She investigated a site where Spanish colonists forced indigenous inhabitants to settle in 1559. Using GPR and digital mapping, she showed how the community was organized and "the subtle ways the Indians may have resisted the Spanish," she says.
"My students have no idea how lucky they are," Conyers says. "They get to work in amazing places."
Larry Conyers, associate professor of anthropology, pulls a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) antenna across the ground at the ancient Roman site of Petra, Jordan. The antenna sends radar waves into the ground and records data about the way they're reflected back from buried archaeological features.
Before traveling to Tunisia to search for ancient churches, Conyers created this computer model of what a buried central chamber of a church should look like in a GPR reflection profile. A reflection profile is generated by software that analyzes data about how radar waves bounce back to the GPR antenna and what the waves' characteristics are.
This is a reflection profile for a fourth-century Christian church that Conyers found buried beneath an olive grove in Tunisia. It shows exactly the types of features that Conyers' model predicted.
When Conyers combined all the reflection profiles from
These maps were constructed like the previous ones from Petra, by combining multiple reflection profiles in a grid. They show a buried kiva in southeastern Utah. Kivas are underground rooms built by the Pueblo Indians in the 12th century and used primarily for ceremonial purposes.
Published on Oct. 31, 2006