The workshop is now completed for 2024-25. It was great, and the participants worked hard, learned much, and we all learned from each other. I have posted reviews from those who completed the workshop sucessfully below.
Those who completed the workshop have now been “promoted’ to accredited advanced GPR interpreters, and they are listed here and included in the maps of the world where all are shown geographically
I am thinking about doing this workshop again next winter. Please write Larry Conyers if you are interested, after you have reviewed the format and topics that are recorded below.
Those who have completed this Advanced GPR Interpretation Workshop will be accredited and their geographic location and contact information will be posted here:
The2021-2022 Advanced GPR Interpretation Workshop.Many thanks to GSSI and California State University Sonoma (as well as other sponsors) for making this workshop happen.
This year Lauren Couey (GSSI) was my co-workshop organizer and Radan specialist.
Here are the recordings to the workshop sessions:
Background sessions:
Dec. 7, 2021: basics on what to do first with GPR data when returning to the field: Time zero, basic processing, reflections, how to describe reflections, and how to determine velocity from hyperbola fitting.
Dec 15, 2021 : Short session on GPR Viewer with more work on velocity, topographic adjustments, how to produce images from profiles, how to annotate those images for reports. Also Surfer basics on gridding, image making and annotations of maps
Dec 17, 2021: Basics on amplitude slicing. How to determine slice thicknesses, and what resolution is in various frequencies. How to determine what a map is showing, and how to adjust maps for various amplitudes. Also basics on comparing profiles to maps, and how to make those in both Surfer and Radan:
Feb. 4, 2022: Late Pleistocene Portugal: mapping fluvial channels in the context of a Late Ice Age hunting site.
Below is the recording of special session on picking the bedrock horizon, and then producing 3-D images of that buried surface, which is a map of the ancient landscape at the end of the Ice Age:
This is the full session where everyone shows their results. Very interesting mix of methods from many participants. Also an introduction to next week, which is a merger of GPR and magnetics:
Feb 11, 2022: Connecticut USA: a 17th century farming community that was covered in flood sand about 1705. Integration of GPR analysis and magnetics.
Below is the short session on merging magnetics and GPR (the “Larry” method of comparing magnetic readings to GPR profiles and amplitude maps, which is very “non traditional”):
Here is our group analysis of features from Hollister, with many different data processing and interpretation methods. With an introduction by Dave Leslie on the recent excavations from the site, which provide an important template forthe interpretations
Mar 4, 2022: Rillito Fan, Arizona: an irrigation system associated with an “Early Agricultural” village on the banks of the Santa Cruz River near Tucson.
short session on placing the canal into space and producing 3-D images
Elle Lillis Virtus Heritage, Pottsville, Australia
Huthaifa Qawasmeh Amman, Jordan
Adrian Serbanescu Bucharest, Romania
Katherine Gadd University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
and a few comments after it was all over:
• I learnt a great deal in this workshop. These last three months have been amazing. Many, many thanks to Larry for spending so much time doing this. I enjoyed being a grad student again! • I also want to express my enormous gratitude to Larry. This workshop changed (improved) my life, not only professionally but also personally, in a very surprising way that I had never imagined before. In these 3 months I was always looking forward to Friday to have these meetings. Now, making a compilation of what has happened, I realize that many times we feel in a separate world but that in reality there are many people like us and finally someone (Larry) had the courage to meet us.
• In this last zoom meeting, we laughed a lot more than at any meeting before. Maybe because we are sad and trying to hide our feelings. I do not have words to describe my feelings now. Larry, thank you for any minute you spent teaching us GPR. Today, I am a new person who can understand how GPR works. My view on the interpretation of GPR reflections is developed. all that because of you. And the most important thing that I get from this workshop is all of you. I meet new wonderful peoples and worked with them for three months. Thanks Larry to give me this opportunity to participant in this workshop.
• Thank you for organizing this. It has been wonderfully instructive, and I have learnt more than I ever imagined there was to learn. It has also been great to finally feel like I am part of a GPR community after floundering around on my own. I appreciate this group on many levels!
• I’m very proud, happy and grateful for all that I learned and not only on my own toolbox but all the GPR-related concepts (on both which I feel now more self-confident and interested to go deeper): It has been a fantastic didactic experience of learning by doing which I hadn’t done since my earlier studies in architectural engineering and not in all my PhD and postdoc experiences in geophysics.
• Especially our last session was really amazing and shocking if compared from where we started, especially the part of the sedimentary filling of the cave… showing how reality can be far from standard interpretations, sometimes (otherwise they shouldn’t be standard or common!).
• It’s been a real pleasure, and I have gotten a much better grasp on how to use GPR for archaeological analysis, which in turn will lead to getting better at interpretation. I am very impressed by the results, application and analyses presented by all the participants. Well done everyone!
• I have very much enjoyed this workshop every Friday. It has given us food for thought over the winter months. I have learnt a great deal from the ‘Master’. I have learnt new ways to analyse and interpret the data using other software than I knew.
• Today is our last day and I will miss our interactions on looking at the homework you have provided us with. This has been challenging but has reaped its rewards as well by understanding how to achieve the results and looking at the data in new ways.
• Linking up with everyone around the world has been great and I hope we continue to keep in touch with each other. Beyond GPR Workshop ‘Larry Style’, this will be great to continue with others who wish to join our get together every couple of weeks or once a month and hopefully Larry will be able to join us.
• Larry, this course has been a revelation. I’ve gone from being a guy who used some basic filters because I read about them somewhere to make slice maps that I looked at for possible archaeological patterns. Then I became someone who looks at individual profiles, has a vocabulary to describe them, can understand how actual features in the ground might be producing the profiles, filtering based on what actually needs to be clarified (less might be better when you understand what you are seeing), and producing slice maps that I can relate to expected features and not just patterns of unknown origin. And now, this week, I am a guy who can look at an individual trace and see useful stuff like phase changes and know what they mean.
• Thanks to Larry for giving up his time and organizing this venture. It has been a pleasure to participate and to be pushed to explore data in different ways and from different settings. The course has been invaluable, and I have a better understanding of GPR processing and therefore interpretation and I already implementing the knowledge in recent surveys. Experiencing different programs and what they produce has also been very interesting, while getting a full knowledge of Larry’s program has been fantastic.
• Thank you, Larry, for letting me join in this workshop, I’m the only one who doesn’t have any background in archeology or geology, but I learned so many things from you and the others. When we started this workshop, I thought it would take a long time to finish, but unfortunately today it’s finished like “speed of light”.
• Thank you, Larry, you’ve done an incredible service to all of us in making this workshop available. Thank you for your time and efforts, you’ve provided many different types of datasets for us to explore and talk about GPR. You gave me an appreciation for all aspects of GPR, different perspectives that I hadn’t considered, and knowledge and confidence to approach the data in a more open/less frigid way. I learned an immense amount, and really enjoyed the different datasets, listening to others, and the process itself.
