With the support of the National Science Foundation, a multi-national, multi-institutional team of archaeologists will work with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab to deploy the Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (AIRSAR) system in southern Mesoamerica and Central America in the spring of 2004. The focal areas of AIRSAR survey will include: northwest Yucatan (Mexico); the Usumacinta River region (Mexico and Guatemala), the Pasion River region (Guatemala), the central and northern Peten (Guatemala); the Central Atlantic Slope of Costa Rica; and the Diquis Region/General Valley (Costa Rica), with connecting transects to include portions of Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.
This research has the following objectives:
(1) To test and refine the effectiveness of the AIRSAR in archaeological applications in tropical and subtropical regions;
(2) To expand our understanding of the occupation history in various regions of southern Mesoamerica and Central America through the combination of AIRSAR maps and archaeological ground survey.
AIRSAR is arguably the most sophisticated and versatile airborne radar platform in the world, with capacities to characterize environments and to detect human alterations to environments that are only now being fully developed. AIRSAR is a unique system that provides multi-band, multi-polar and multi-frequency data of broad areas with resolutions significantly higher than those of publicly available satellite and shuttle images. In addition, the long wavelength, low frequency radar signals of AIRSAR penetrate through forest canopy, which presents an unprecedented potential for archaeological applications in the tropical environment. Simply put, AIRSAR can acquire data that can be provided by no other instrument or research methodology.
Our present understanding of Precolumbian socioeconomic and political organization in southern Mexico and Central America is based on evidence from a very limited sample of archaeological features across an enormous cultural landscape. Dense forest coverage in many regions has limited the application of previous remote sensing technologies and ground survey. The AIRSAR mission presents a unique and promising opportunity to penetrate the forest canopy and detect an array of critical archaeological and associated ecological features. If the system functions as anticipated, results could be breakthrough discoveries of new sites, and offer new or revised images of archaeological features including settlement size and density, agricultural systems, systems of causeways, trade networks, and fortifications. Thus, ground checked data derived from AIRSAR would make a significant contribution to our understandings of Precolumbian societies in Mexico and Central America.
Furthermore, the successful application of AIRSAR has implications far beyond archaeology. Diverse ecosystems of southern Mesoamerica and Central America, including rainforests, cloud forests, wetlands, and coastal floodplains, are being destroyed at an alarming rate, because of agriculture, logging, and development, as well as anthropogenic climate change. Their loss implies significant effects on local weather patterns, freshwater supplies, habitats for numerous species, and global climate. The ability to link data pertaining to the modern and ancient landscapes through data from AIRSAR offers a long-term perspective on anthropogenic environmental change in these vulnerable ecosystems.
