FORT SCOTT — Historic Fort Scott is getting high-tech treatment, thanks to Adam Wiewel and his team from the Midwest Archeology Center in Lincoln, Neb., who’ve been surveying the site for the past two weeks.
Wiewel’s wife, Rebecca (Fritche) Wiewel, originally from Iola, also works for the center in charge of distance learning, outreach and more.
Weiwel said the archeologists’ role is to advise parks across the Midwest, “and when they have questions about cultural resources we provide them with information about the archeology. Sometimes we end up actually visiting the parks to help them out and do projects like this one.”
As for the specific project at Fort Scott, Wiewel said it’s been 10 years in the making.
Things were supposed to ramp up last year, but like so much of life, the undertaking was derailed due to COVID-19.
Currently underway, “the project involves a geophysical survey, test excavations and analysis/write-up of everything over a three-year period,” Wiewel said.
And the team isn’t just collecting data at Fort Scott, but also Fort Larned, Fort Union Trading Post in North Dakota and Fort Smith in Arkansas, where they’re headed next.
As Wiewel put it, “the project involves archaeology at four forts and trading posts in the midwest region.”
Specifically, “the initial year involves multi-instrument geophysical surveys, so we use instruments like a ground-penetrating radar, electrical resistance, electromagnetic induction and magnetic radiometry.”
“Each of those instruments measures some property of the near-surface, [for instance,] electrical or magnetic properties of the soil,” he explained.
“Archeological features that are buried or below ground tend to alter those [soil and other] properties, so these instruments will create a signal, and archeology affects the signal, and so the instruments pick up the difference,” Wiewel said.
What one ends up with, thanks to various instruments, is “a digital visualization of below-ground archeology.”
In the case of ground-penetrating radar, Wiewel explained, “the radar energy is passing into the ground and reflecting off of objects below-ground, so out here at the fort, where there are remnants of foundations, stone walls and cisterns, all of those generate pretty strong reflections. And as you pass over the top of them, you can actually see the radar energy on the screen reflect off of them.”
“There’s a characteristic pattern to that,” he said.
A BIG reason why Wiewel’s survey is desirable, is that archeologists and others actually prefer NOT to dig if and when that’s possible.
