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GPS/Surface Feature Survey

		Fox Gap is not an inviting place in the Winter.  The wind and weather howl through the pass, and there’s very little shelter.  For the first part of the Fox Gap project, Winter held an important natural advantage that more than made up for the discomfort faced by our crew: all the leaves were down. This allowed us easy passage through wooded areas that are choked with vegetation during the rest of the year, and it made the old roads, stone walls, fencelines, bottle dumps, and other surface features of Fox Gap’s history quite visible. During February and March of 2002, a four person crew of IUP archaeologists completed an inventory of approximately 25 acres of state, federal and Central Maryland Heritage League land in and around Fox Gap, and relocated over 30 surface features.
An archaeologist uses a GPS unit to precisely map the location of an old road bed at Fox Gap

All these features were located by using one of the oldest archaeological techniques: a systematic walk-over of the properties by teams of archaeologists moving through the forest at regular intervals, simply noting any surface features they saw, and marking them with pin flags and colored tape.  The features were then formally recorded with 21st century technology. A Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver was used to fix the actual locations of all the surface features by bouncing signals off satellites and recording the locations on a data recorder, downloaded later directly into a computer.  The GPS unit can fix the precise locations of the surface features to a tolerance of less than 10 meters, and saved us quite literally weeks of old-fashioned surveying and mapping.  The result of the survey was an accurate picture of the road network, field and property boundaries, and other features of the landscape that played an important role in the historic settlement and use of Fox Gap, and in events of the battle that was fought there.
		A GPS unit (yellow) and a more traditional compass were both used to map surface features at Fox Gap.