Chase Pipes, co-owner of Smoky Mountain Relic Room, has extensive experience with searching for and excavating historical artifacts. Grounded in history, paleontology, archaeology, and geology, Chase Pipes has participated in restoring artifacts, historical re-enactments, and teaching the above disciplines to others. In the last few decades, though, geology and archaeology have converged to create a new field known as geoarchaeology.
Geoarchaeology has come to assist researchers with understanding the history of humans from a different approach. More specifically, the field is interested in discovering the human impact on an environment. Researchers in this area not only focus on impact, but they also derive human history by looking at human activities in an area and placing them in some type of context.
More recently, the central methods by which researchers gather information is GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and DEMs (Digital Elevation Models). These tools allow researchers to collect three-dimensional pictures of artifacts, land area, and other features to be pictured from a greater perspective. These technologies also allow researchers to better understand and interpret interconnected sites, spatial relationships, structure, and land formation processes.
