Cleveland Museum of Natural History researchers uncovering prehistoric American Indian settlement
Huron County- The first clue that something unusual lay hidden beneath the old bean field didn't come from digging in the hard-packed dirt. Archaeology is still fundamentally about digging, but that would come later.
No, the earliest suggestion of something worth uncovering on this plateau above the Huron River was some dark electronic smudges on a piece of graph paper. To an untrained eye, they looked like random squiggles - a few dots, two stripes running roughly parallel to each other, and an oval outline shaped like a chicken egg.
The smudges piqued Brian Redmond's professional curiosity, though.
They were a kind of map of the bean field's subsurface, traced by an instrument called a fluxgate gradiometer.
American archaeologists have only recently begun to rely on the devices. Sweeping one a few inches above the ground produces a sort of magnetic fingerprint of subsurface soil that has been disturbed in some way, whether by digging or burning.
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No, the earliest suggestion of something worth uncovering on this plateau above the Huron River was some dark electronic smudges on a piece of graph paper. To an untrained eye, they looked like random squiggles - a few dots, two stripes running roughly parallel to each other, and an oval outline shaped like a chicken egg.
The smudges piqued Brian Redmond's professional curiosity, though.
They were a kind of map of the bean field's subsurface, traced by an instrument called a fluxgate gradiometer.
American archaeologists have only recently begun to rely on the devices. Sweeping one a few inches above the ground produces a sort of magnetic fingerprint of subsurface soil that has been disturbed in some way, whether by digging or burning.