SASS – UMass Boston – Fiske Center – Archaeology

Blog of the Skagafjordur Archaeological Settlement Survey

GPR at the Stóra Seyla Churchyard

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Brian Damiata has put together a quicktime movie of the slices of the Stóra Seyla Churchyard.  The movie shows the radar waves and they reflect off of deeper surfaces.  Usually, GPR data is viewed as a radargram, which shows the microwaves as they reflect off hard surfaces.  Brian has taken 251 radargrams (one each time he walked back and forth) with the 500 MHz antenna.  He took all those radargrams and sliced them using GPR-Slice software.  The result is a map.  The hard reflectors are in red, the soft in blue.

Seyla Churchyard Quicktime Movie

Starting in slice 5 (17 to 25 cm below the ground surface) you can begin to see a round image.  This image goes to Slice 12 (40-47 cm below the ground surface).  This is a round turf churchyard wall.  It surrounds the graveyard.  The wall is about 16 meters in diameter.   In the center of the circle is a square red object.  This is probably the small church.

In the deeper slices, you can see grave cuts (blue) and graves (Red).  A big one can bee seen on slice 33.

In the Radargram you can see the church wall at the top at 5640998.  You can see the grave shaft at 564099  and then just below it at 564100 the ∩ of the strong reflection of the grave.  The church can bee seen at the top  from 564106 to 564109.
 

Author: John Steinberg

Dr. John Steinberg has been a Research Scientist at the Fiske Center since 2006. He received his PhD in Anthropology from UCLA in 1997. Before coming to UMass Boston, John taught at UCLA and California State University Northridge. He is interested in the economic problems of colonization, both in New England and across the North Atlantic. He uses GIS and shallow geophysics to study settlement patterns to understand broad trends over the landscape. In addition to John's New England work, he has been studying the settlement patterns of Viking Age Iceland. John is the director of the Digital Archaeology Laboratory at the Fiske Center.

One Comment

  1. Can you post a photo of what’s at the Stóra Seyla Churchyard now, for comparison to the radargram?

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