GPR prospecting in a prehispanic village, NW Argentina

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

JOURNAL OF APPLIED GEOPHYSICS

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Año: 2009 vol. 67 p. 80 - 87

0926-9851

Palo Blanco is an approximately 1600 year old archaeological site located in Fiambalá Valley, in the Andean region of Argentina. Pioneer archaeological studies published in the 70s reported the existence of five residential units in this site. Also a small cemeterywhich included three circular tombswas discovered near to these buildings. 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 fixed offset GPR configurations to investigate two areas inwhich these buildings could be expected.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 employedmethodology revealed the location of both buildings. Also a number of new non-reported structures were predicted and confirmed.