Geophysical investigations were conducted at the La Purisima Mission State Historic Park to understand potential impacts due to the proposed development of a new visitor’s center.

One response to “Geophysical investigations were conducted at the La Purisima Mission State Historic Park to understand potential impacts due to the proposed development of a new visitor’s center.”

1. Larry Conyers

   October 30, 2025

   I am a little embarrassed by this paper. But am going to post it anyway so you can see what we were thinking back in “the old days”. This was about 2000 and we had just figured out how to make amplitude slice-maps of GPR data, and with the EM and seismic data we were in “map overload”. So, we just posted them all in the hope that someone could figure it all out. We surely didn’t! I now know there was a really interesting river channel running through the largest of these grids, and on the bank of that channel were small structures and work areas. It took going back to these data in about 2012 before I found all those. It took an analysis of the 2-D reflection profiles to make these discoveries. But in 2000 we just blew past the ‘tried and true” method of data analysis and went directly to the maps in the hope that “image recognition” would be enough. We know better now, but I have found out that many people are still stuck in the “mind set” that we were in 2000. I hope therefore that this paper can be a reminder of how fraught that type of data analysis can be!

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