Abstract
Abstract. In the summer of 2012 students and professors from the Concrete Industry Management (CIM ) program at California State University Chico, along with their partners at National Park Service, invited Texas A&M students and professors to join forces and perform a condition assessment of the Recreation Yard at Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. The Recreation Yard is a heavily visited area by tourists who are drawn to the island because of its history as a maximum security prison in the 20th c. Because of its history, first as a military fort in the 19thc., later as a military prison, and finally as a federal prison, many difficult historical and preservation related questions exist. This team was formed to begin research on the historical and preservation questions with respect to the Recreation Yard. This paper and presentation will focus on the integration of documentation technologies employed to aid the research necessary for answering preservation and historical questions regarding the recreations yard. Since that yard was constructed on top of the historic 19th c masonry fort it was requested that we also seek the location of tunnels below the Recreation Yard and their relationship with the walls. Teams were formed to perform Non-destructive testing of concrete walls to determine the size and location of rebar, Ground Penetrating Radar for determining the location of the masonry tunnels and photogrammetry and laser scanning to provide both overall and detailed dimensional information of the current state of material decay.
Highlights
Most preservation projects are comprised of multiple disciplines working towards a common goal
It is well-known to Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) practitioners that a number of data processing steps must be performed in order to prepare GPR images for archaeological interpretation
In this initial field report, we do not aim for a complete and definitive treatment of the rec-yard GPR data, but merely describe the processing steps that we performed to bring the data into presentation shape
Summary
Most preservation projects are comprised of multiple disciplines working towards a common goal. In 2012 the National Park Service with its partner in the Concrete Industry Management (CIM) program at California State University, Chico invited students and professors at Texas A&M’s Center for Heritage Conservation (CHC) to participate in creating a preservation plan for the recreation yard at Alcatraz Island. An important element of the plan was to combine multiple types of information together to aid the understanding of the analysis of current conditions recreation yard and the recommendations for its future preservation. The recreation yard was constructed in 1912 to give the military prisoners some relief from the harsh conditions of prison life. It consisted of reinforced concrete walls 20 ft.
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