CAST researchers worked with the The Milot Archaeological Project (MAP) team, led by Dr. J. Cameron Monroe (UC - Santa Cruz) to collect ground-penetrating radar (GPR) surveys to map and identify the subsurface features within the Milot complex. With these data, the MAP investigates an example of state formation from the early modern Atlantic World: the short-lived Kingdom of Haiti (1811-1820), which emerged in the years following the Haitian Revolution. Essential research questions that the MAP seeks answer include: (1) did the Kingdom of Haiti draw from earlier forms of power in the region, and (2) did the Kingdom of Haiti restructure and routinize the social lives of its citizenry, or rather was it focused largely on public spectacles that sat suspended above everyday social life? The MAP mobilizes documentary and archaeological evidence to explore the relationship between architectural space and political power, evaluating competing models for the nature of Haitian political authority in the early 19th century.

Project tags:
Spatial Archaeometry; Image Analysis

ArkansasView, established in 2002, is a consortium of faculty, staff, students, and employees in university, state agency, and nonprofit organizations building remote sensing and geospatial capacity within Arkansas. This work is being accomplished primarily through educational, targeted research and outreach, and other remote sensing and geospatial endeavors that benefit Arkansans. With support from ArkansasView, a new PhD degree in Geosciences with a geoinformatics track began in August 2014. This program allows doctoral students at the state's flagship University of Arkansas to focus more directly on remote sensing and related research questions. For undergraduate students, an ArkansasView-supported proposal to the Arkansas Department of Higher Education led to the August 2014 launch of an undergraduate certificate at University of Arkansas titled "Certificate of Proficiency in Geospatial Technologies," offered completely online. In a new partnership with Communities Unlimited (www.communitiesu.org), a nonprofit serving communities in Arkansas and six neighboring states, ArkansasView is facilitating student intern development of geospatial workflows that address persistently poor rural communities' access to basic water infrastructure. ArkansasView is committed to geospatial provenance and innovative geodata analysis research that simplifies and strengthens remote sensing workflow design.

Project tags:
GIS, GNSS and Mapping; Image Analysis; Technology Education

The historic Fort Randall Post Cemetery, located in Gregory County, South Dakota, contains well over 100 burials dating to the mid to late nineteenth century. A previous investigation of the site utilizing documentary evidence, aerial photographs, and targeted coring located many previously recorded and undocumented graves within the main fenced area of the cemetery. To locate additional unmarked graves within an area adjacent to the cemetery, a multi-instrument remote sensing investigation of the site was undertaken by CAST and administered through the South Dakota State Historical Society, Archaeological Research Center (ARC). Historic cemeteries are one of the most challenging contexts for remote sensing applications and graves are especially difficult to locate when they lack high contrast materials such as brick burial vaults or metal coffins, which is typical of nineteenth century cemeteries. Multi -instrument approaches offer the greatest likelihood of successfully mapping unknown grave locations. Results of the survey will be published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Project tags:
Spatial Archaeometry; Image Analysis; GIS, GNSS and Mapping

The NSF-funded Plant Imaging Consortium (PIC) brings together experts in plant biology, radiochemistry, phenomics, imaging, and computational biology to apply high-throughput phenotyping and molecular imaging techniques to the study of plant stress biology. High-throughput phenotyping (HTP) allows breeders to screen large populations of plants quickly and efficiently, and to quantify numerous complex traits that are not obvious to the naked eye. Molecular imaging (MI) techniques such positron emission tomography (ie. PET scans) utilize radioactive, fluorescent, or luminescent probes to elucidate the physiological processes that govern stress tolerance or susceptibility in plants. Together, these bioimaging technologies have transformative power to link genotype to phenotype and identify genetic sources of stress tolerance for crop improvement.

Project tags:
Reality Capture

project description needed...

Project tags:
Digital Preservation

The expansion of this NEH-funded project focuses on building a more robust interface for georeferencing, as well as storage and distribution of the CORONA images. The study area increased to include Eastern China and those surrounding regions. CORONA image coverage is abundant in these areas and its value to archaeology and other fields has been well-demonstrated; however, other areas of the world are being explored as the project progresses. The large majority of the images we provide come from the KH4B satellites, the latest generation of CORONA missions in operation from September 1967 through May 1972.

Project tags:
Digital Preservation; GIS, GNSS and Mapping; Spatial Archaeometry, Image Analysis

project description needed...

Project tags:
Spatial Archaeometry; Image Analysis

In collaboration with The Field Museum, CAST researchers conducted aerial surveys resulting in photography/photogrammetry, ground-penetrating radar (GPR) surveys, and magnetometry surveys to map the surface and to identify subsurface architecture on and around the platform mounds and sunken circular plazas at the site of Caballete in the Norte Chico region of Peru. This collaboration among CAST researchers and local Peruvian archaeologists uses innovative and experimental geophysical/remote sensing techniques to explore the Late Archair ceremonial structures and plan for later, more targeted excavations.

Project tags:
Spatial Archaeometry; Image Analysis

project description needed...

Project tags:
Image Analysis; GIS, GNSS and Mapping

project description needed...

Project tags:
Image Analysis; GIS, GNSS and Mapping; Spatial Archaeometry

project description needed...

Project tags:
Spatial Archaeometry; 3D Reconstruction; Reality Capture; Network Analysis; GIS, GNSS and Mapping; Technology Education; Digital Preservation; Image Analysis

Focusing on the northern Fertile Crescent, a study region of more than 200,000 sq km extending from the eastern Mediterranean to northern Iraq, the project brings together specialists in archaeology, environmental remote sensing, and geomatics to explore settlement and environmental histories through an innovative remote-sensing based series of analyses aimed at creating a model of dynamic trends in land cover and environmental change, or land surface phenology, over the past 30 years based on gridded climate data available through NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) and remote sensing-based vegetation series derived from AVHRR and Landsat satellite data. In a region like the northern Fertile Crescent, where nearly all pre-industrial settlement was dependent on highly variable and relatively sparse precipitation, documenting the full effects that minor variations in climate can have is critical to understanding settlement and land use in the past and present. Our methods will enable us to map the actual effects that years or seasons with higher or lower than average rainfall had on land cover throughout the study region.

Project tags:
Image Analysis; Spatial Archaeometry; GIS, GNSS and Mapping

project description needed...

Project tags:
Network Analysis; Image Analysis

The CI-TRAIN project is a partnership of institutions of higher education to transform the practice of information technology services for enabling scientific discovery. The CI-TRAIN project was founded by institutions in Arkansas and West Virginia in a partnership that builds on common research in nanoscience and geosciences and leverages complementary expertise.

Project tags:
Spatial Archaeometry; 3D Reconstruction; Reality Capture; Network Analysis; GIS, GNSS and Mapping; Technology Education; Digital Preservation; Image Analysis

project description needed...

Project tags:
Image Analysis; Reality Capture; GIS, GNSS and Mapping

This project was funded by the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP), Department of Defense. ArchaeoFusion is a tool for Archaeologists and others who use ground penetrating sensors to build subsurface maps. ArchaeoFusion will load data from many sources, processes the data, and then integrate it into a clear representation of subsurface features.

Project tags:
Spatial Archaeometry; Image Analysis

The Hampson Museum Collection represents one of the world's most extraordinary collections of American Indian artistic expression as well as a major source of data on the lives and history of late pre-Columbian peoples of the Mississippi River Valley. The collections at the museum are the result of extensive excavations of the Nodena Site as well as excavations at other sites in the region by Dr James K. Hampson, as well as work by others including the University of Alabama and the University of Arkansas.

Project tags:
Reality Capture; Digital Preservation; Image Analysis