GPR prospecting in a prehispanic village, NW Argentina

Palo Blanco is an approximately 1600 year old archaeological site located in Fiambala 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 cemetery which included three circular tombs was 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 in which 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 employed methodology revealed the location of both buildings. Also a number of new non-reported structures were predicted and confirmed. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.