Who came up with the idea of using volunteer teams with metal detectors to survey fields?
It’s kind of a low-tech, low-cost remote sensing. Metal detectors are simply low-cost near-surface electrical conductivity meters. They are a geophysical method. When Richard Fox and I began planning the first Little Bighorn investigations we were well aware of work from the 1950s on that site and others where metal detectors were used to find battle artifacts. Those initial efforts had mixed results due to detector technology of that time. By the 1980s detectors were much more sophisticated and sensitive to buried metals, so it was a natural choice of equipment to use on a battle site where firearms predominated We also realized that we did not have the time or funding to conduct a traditional archaeological inventory and testing program, so using volunteer metal detectors seemed to be a reasonable alternative. As they say, the rest is history. Later I did a computer simulation on the Little Bighorn metal-detected artifact find locations by laying a shovel test array over the field, w
