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This is actually the second excavation to turn up no actual corpses. I don't think there's any basis for doubt that a lot of children died at the residential schools, partly due to the fact that children dying was a common occurrence back then, and partly due to the fact that they were kept in crowded housing that promoted the spread of infectious disease. Poor nutrition and extra susceptibility to European diseases may or may not have been factors.
However, it's clear now that the false positive rate of these GPR investigations is very high (0 for 48, by my count), and representing these hits as the discovery of definite or probable corpses was grossly irresponsible.
I don't remember to what extent the media actively encouraged this misinterpretation, or at least failed to discourage it in their reporting, but a lot of people were under the impression that these GPR surveys provided proof of hundreds of deaths above and beyond those which had already been documented, and/or cover-ups of actual murders.
My name is a snarky reference to the bizarre fixation of the left on the imaginary crime of crossing state lines during coverage of the Rittenhouse case, and has nothing to do with Nazis.
As someone with fairly extensive geophysics experience, GPR is pretty meh and I've always found it weird that it's treated as though it was anything other than a very noisy form of sensing that can only tell you when the subsurface material changes (and even then, the depth and size of the change is hard to ever be sure about). Geophysics is inherently very unreliable when it comes to trying to identify small changes below the surface and I'm very much not surprised that these graves are false positives. Plenty of the actual papers that back up the use of the GPR for this purpose found as much and similar uses, like detecting utilities or animal burrows or cavities is just as unreliable. The effectiveness of GPR also depends on the materials involved, which can reduce your penetration to mere inches.
Do you geophys professionally?
I like to imagine someone geophysing my back yard 2000 years from now finding indications of high heat and excavating my burn pile pit. While interpreting it as some sort of 'ceremonial', offering location.
I've watched too much 'Time Team'.
I did lot in my grad school research, mostly seismic and resistivity. A little professionally afterwards.
Most won't have the resolution to pick up a small, residential burn pit, depending how deep it is anyway. Electrical methods might pick it up, since they're sometimes decent resolution near the surface.
In foundation engineering, finding trash pits and burn pits during development when doing test borings or excavations in long developed areas is pretty common. God forbid you hit an undocumented landfill. That's a good way to get your project delayed ($$$). Sometimes you'll need to have a cultural study done if they think it could be a historical landmark or archeological site, so your idle thoughts aren't too out of line with reality ha.
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Could you elaborate a little More on the effects of materials? Does it work at all in wet soils which I imagine absorb microwaves very efficiently?
Well, GPR works based on reflecting em waves, so it runs into the same issues that pure electric geophysical methods and purely mechanical geophysical methods run into. Mechanical challenges like scattering or interference from voids, thin nonrepresentarive layers, layer inversions, boulders, etc. Electrical challenges like water content variations, voids, salt/contamination, etc. They are also generally way lower resolution than the layman would expect.
Electrical methods are generally more sensitive to moisture content, and in my experience, are more likely to detect a change in moisture rather than material (material and moisture are generally correlated). And that's kind of the thing with most geophysical methods, they're telling you when a material changes and by moving your sensing equipment you can see how that change is related to space.
There are GPR "suitability maps" for the US that show vaguely where you can expect GPR to be accurate. I haven't seen one for Canada though, but GPR would be usable in areas with similar surface geology.
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