Thanks to some newfangled radar, archeologists looked for traces of old burial spots on the Green — and found some were closer to the surface than expected.
The New Haven Green was once the site of a Colonial-era cemetery. When the grave stones were moved to the Grove Street Cemetery, the skeletal remains were left behind.
With that history in mind, a group of Yale archaeologists picked the spot to test out a high-tech piece of equipment Tuesday.
Using a Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) machine, the archaeologists discovered what appeared to be a number of shallow graves underground behind the Center Church on the Green.
They made the find as part of a try-before-you-buy session with a new GPR machine, called a Noggin SmartCart. The $25,000 device is made by a Canadian company called Sensors and Software. The university is considering buying it for research at archaeology sites around the world.
Designed for archaeologists, the machine uses radar to create an image of what lies underground. At just past 11 on Tuesday morning, company representative Greg Summers (at left in top photo) was showing Yale’s Ken Panko (at right) how it works.
The machine is mounted on an all-terrain cart, which an archaeologist pushes back and forth like a lawnmower across an area to be surveyed. The machine scans the depths in segments and then assembles a kind of image of what lies below.
Pointing to the machine’s display, Summers indicated an anomaly that the machine had discovered. He said that it looked to be the remains of a grave. Punching some buttons, he determined that it was just 0.8 meters (2.6 feet) below the surface.
“A shallow grave,” he remarked. He said that the machine had already found several such anomalies.
“Archaeologists are increasingly relying on this type of equipment,” said William Honeychurch, an archaeology professor in Yale’s anthropology department, who was standing nearby.
Ground-Penetrating Radar allows archaeologists to discover large artifacts beneath the ground, like the outlines of ancient ruins or forgotten roads, said Yukiko Tonoike (at right in photo), a laboratory manager in the anthropology department.
Honeychurch (at left in photo) said that the university is likely to buy the machine, which could then be sent to ongoing Yale research sites in Peru, Mongolia, and Africa. It might also be put to use closer to home, he said.
“We would like to do a long-term research project here,” he said gesturing at the Green. The project could be done by Yale students learning how to use the new Noggin Smartcart, he added.
In an email on Tuesday evening, Tonoike said that the GPR survey had turned up fewer possible burial features than predicted. She expressed surprise, since records show that burials were quite dense in the area behind Center Church. Yale will study the matter more in the future, through historical archive research and more GPR work, she said.