GPR prospecting in a prehispanic village, NW Argentina

BONOMO, NÉSTOR; CEDRINA, LORENA; OSELLA, ANA; RATTO, NORMA

JOURNAL OF APPLIED GEOPHYSICS

Año: 2007

0926-9851

Palo Blanco is an approximately 1700 years old archaeological site located in Fiambalá Valley, in the Andean region of Argentina. Pioneer archaeological studies published in the 70’s reported the existence of five residential units and a small cemetery which included three circular tombs in the site. Since that time, a profuse sedimentation covered the zone, so nowadays there are no evidences of most of these buildings on surface. Because of an imprecise location of the structures, most of the buildings became in fact missed. Then, in this work we aimed to re-localize two of the missed buildings, a residential unit and a tomb, by applying ground penetrating radar (GPR) methodology. We used fast monostatic GPR configurations to investigate two extensive areas in which these buildings could be expected, in minimal times. We used experimental and synthetic patterns to aid the identification of the characteristic signals due to the archaeological targets. We applied migration to the data to better define and resolve unclear anomalous signals. The employed methodology revealed the location of both buildings. Also a number of new non reported structures were predicted and confirmed.