Twelve years ago I fired an archaeologist for dowsing on a project he was
paid to be surveying. Last semester I downgraded a senior's undergrad
thesis for dowsing on a site she was surveying. Now, don't get me wrong.
You can call the psychic hotline if you think it will get you answers in
the field. Just don't do it with my crews and my client's money.
 
Alright, that's a hard line. We all know that experienced field
archaeologists can develop strong intuitions about where sites and
features of various sort lie buried. These intuitions may be fed by
unconscious observations of microtopography, barely discernible soil or
crop colors, or whatever. Maybe dowsing and Ouiga Boards  and scapulamancy
help some folks tune this intuition. But you still have to dig the holes.
It's when people come back from surveys and tell me they had a crew
sitting on their butts while they dowsed all over hill and dale looking
for graves or ditches...that's when the fur goes up on the back of my
neck.
 
Same is true of more theoretically defensible forms of remote sensing. You
can run your radar and magnetometry and resistivity machines all day,
shove the data into a computer, roll out your dot-density plots, and what
have you got (usually): some "anomalies." In the same amount of time,
four undergrads or crew persons with shovels and trowels would have
identified a late Middle Woodland hearth, a 17th-c. cellar, a well, and a
brick sidewalk.
 
I know that remote sensing CAN be very useful. I remember seeing a
dot-density plot of an early Neolithic eastern European settlement
produced by Ruth Tringham. House outlines, room divisions, alleys--you
name it--and without digging anything. Under the right conditions (which
in this case was a loess plain along the Danube, I believe), remote
sensing can save a great deal of time and money, and can find things you
had no idea were there.
 
But an unbridled faith in remote sensing and "non-intrusive" methods is,
IMHO, usually misplaced, misguided, and prone to horrible wastes of time
and money. As for the coat hangers, which don't even have a vaguely
reasonable theoretical defense, keep them off my sites, please.
 
Dan Mouer