The Fort at Butt's Hill

LiDAR hillshade of the Butts Hill Fort earthworks.

HEVA Lab collaborates with the Battle of Rhode Island Association (BoRIA) at Butts Hill Fort in Portsmouth, Rhode Island — the largest surviving Revolutionary War fortification in southeastern New England. The fort served as the American headquarters during the Battle of Rhode Island on August 29, 1778, the largest military engagement of the war within the former colony — and the first official allied military cooperation between French and American forces. The battle was fought in part by the First Rhode Island Regiment, the first military unit in American history to enroll Black and Native American soldiers, whose members helped construct the fort. The site is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and, since 2021, on the National Historic Trail of the Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route.

Supporting the Association's effort to preserve and interpret the site, HEVA members carried out a non-invasive geophysical survey of the fort, integrating magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to map buried earthworks and features without disturbing the ground.

This work was presented as “Integrating magnetometry and ground penetrating radar at the American Revolutionary War fortification in Butts Hill Fort (Portsmouth, Rhode Island, USA)” by Koontz, Wise, Nolin, Keppeler, Rodriguez, Mink, Crothers, Murphy, Robertson, Uhl, Bailey, and Reyes-Centeno at CAA 2026 (University of Vienna).