This Drone Could Find the Lost Colony of Roanoke

For today’s crop of scientists, the treasure at stake is an answer: what happened to the Lost Colony? It’s a mystery that still packs enough suspense to mobilize several teams of archeologists aiming high-tech hardware at the sandy soils of coastal Carolina. Magnetometers alert them to buried metal. Ground-penetrating radar picks up shadowy changes in density where objects are buried or ground has been dug. And when an artifact does turn up, archeologists can summon the magical powers of subatomic physics to pin down its age.

This new tool of physics, Deetz says, “sounds like make believe, but it works.” It’s called optically stimulated luminescence, and it can help date a layer of soil, give or take a year or two, and therefore the artifacts buried within it. A high-tech probe burrowed into the ground sets off a reaction in the quartz and other minerals, releasing trapped electrons and revealing when the soil last saw sunlight.

But even as these powerful tools probe the ground, archeology, always so down-to-earth, has also gone airborne. That svelte little drone cruising just above the forest canopy of Bertie County, N.C., back in July? It was packing Lidar, a radar-like device that uses lasers to peer through vegetation and detect patterns etched in the earth.