Yes, it is very likely this is true.
Got an address, I’ll Google Earth it!
ETA: Okay, look further South, where it narrows to wetlands.
Well, if there are documents, it’s “History” not Archaeology, no?
You were talking about going to a house etc…
And no need to go to Google Earth, I assume you’re talking about the drainage channels on the barrier islands. The modern mosquito control drainage channels.
You’re missing the point. History with a big H (which could be loosely defined as “that collective sum of knowledge and data points about how past humans lived, what they did and possibly why”) includes archaeology as a matter of course ; history with a small h (the academic scientific discipline) however is very primarily based on textual analysis, yes. Some representations as well, but mostly the written word, by definition.
That’s why we used to call everything that came before the first clay tablets “pre-history” and thus implicitly not-history, although prehistorians have been salty about that for long enough that new terminology is used these days. Historians by and large don’t work on the ground, that sounds horribly like legwork which we’re more than happy to leave to the archaeo department. *We *work in comfy armchairs with the air conditioning on, thank you very much.
Perhaps that’s because some other professor was working on economic history but your own rightfully found that shit incredibly dull and uninteresting. Or because everything to be said about it has been discussed already, barring new discoveries - a large amount of “teaching history” involves putting a large amount of students in the general proximity of a large amount of books and sort of assume some osmotic transfer of knowledge is going to happen at the organic level :D, so maybe if you were interested in that you should have spent more evenings at the library.
Again, I can’t speak for your specific teacher(s) or their methodology ; but there’s nothing “pointless” about the material history exercise you describe, and work of that nature is done all over the globe to degrees you would be baffled by. I still love that example for its ostensible absurdity, but my third year Contemporary History TA was working on a thesis about “sleep patterns and disruptions of sleep during the Commune de Paris”. Try and find a narrower field than that ! Obviously she wasn’t *only *interested in that, and it was just her angle to analyze the Commune itself… but that’s history for you. Poring over picayune details, establishing typologies, drawing up statistical charts. They all add up to lives lived.
Yep, I was right.
Look, I’ll be honest with you - if your research abilities are so poor that you didn’t find out pretty quickly that those channels were created in the 30s by the Civilian Conservation Corps (something I, half a world away, could ascertain in 30 seconds via just the internet, no Uni library reading needed) then I would seriously question if you belong in a History Masters program in the first place.
That’s hilarious…
That pattern is EVERYWHERE, and places we STILL have not been. Later editions of the Surveyors’ Manual dictate that satellite imagery can be used to identify other meander lines, and thus claim more Public Lands.
Buddy, you have NO IDEA what you are talking about.
Within the scope of that exercise, we ‘could’ have looked for the location of the actual house…examine the area for historical context…ask Why did these people have these items, what place or function did they have or serve in their society.
Yeah, we didn’t build those canals…they are pre-columbian.
They are everywhere, including South America, Asia, Europe. I’ve found them on remote islands. My discovery was of an ancient global civilization that collapsed 4500 -5500 years ago, but my advisors demanded I make it a North American study.
There it is.
Agreed, which is why it should have been about MORE than these inventories…
Can we agree History is a pursuit, not a static thing?
Yes, almost everywhere one can point to, there is evidence of “grid gardens and or fluvial fields”…
These same formations were found and dated in Bolivia to 4700- A Fluvial Field - Imgur
An ancient society was REALLY into farming…
Ooowkay there. I’mma take a few steps backs veeeery slowly while keeping my hands in a non-threatening posture now.
Then I’mma fucking leg it.
Yeah, skeptic-tactic numero uno, avoid evidence contrary to your current thought pattern.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. 
No, we know exactly who built them, and when. The New Deal is well documented recent history, FFS.
Why are you going back to Uni, Graham? Is thebook money not coming in like it used to?
Uh, No.
Did they build these too? Ancient Rectangles - Imgur
What about these? NOT Modern Canals - Imgur
Is there a grid pattern in that picture that I’m not seeing?
“these”? You mean the modern farms? Or the archaeological trenching?
Not in that image.
So my find is of a global industrial agricultural society. They farmed on MASSIVE scales, and employed this rectangular grid garden and or “fluvial fields” which is what you see imaged here. Similar formations such as these have been dated to 4700 years ago.
Here’s a mind blower, Yes, modern farmers are now employing these fields, and we can create enough food to feed what 500 million people, easily, in America alone…?
“They are only one-third occupied.”
THAT means, at full production, these areas could have fed BILLIONS…
So what the fuck did you mean by “those same formations”?
Fluvial fields…terraforming raised gardens to help with irrigation. They are ancient, massive, and largely unused today.