Lidar mapping and surface survey of the Izapa state on the tropical piedmont of Chiapas, Mexico

Using Airborne LiDAR Survey to explore Historic-era archaeological landscapes of Montserrat in the Eastern Caribbean

“…One of the earliest applications of airborne LiDAR to archaeology focused on the 18th-century plantation landscape of Maryland: the results of mapping at Tulip Hall and Wye Hall revealed traces of historical gardens, outbuildings, and pathways that conveyed a much more intricate landscape and dynamic built environment than previously detected by standard archaeological methods (Harmon et al 2006). As in our own work on Montserrat, the combination of LiDAR analysis, pedestrian survey, and other archaeological data sources to locate previously unknown sites has been productive in the forests of southern New England (Johnson and Ouimet 2014), in the piedmont area surrounding the Mesoamerican site of Izapa in Chiapas, Mexico (Rosenswig et al 2013), and in the investigation of archaic shell mounds on the St. John's River in Florida (Randall 2014). Recent adjustments to standard classification approaches in the FrancheComte region of France have improved the ability to distinguish standing architecture from surrounding vegetation in LiDAR visualizations (Opitz and Nuninger 2014).…”

“…To date, the majority of archaeological research projects involving airborne LiDAR have been undertaken in northern and western Europe (Opitz and Cowley 2013). However, the dramatic results of airborne LiDAR mapping at the Maya settlement of El Caracol in Belize and other Mesoamerican sites (Chase et al 2011(Chase et al , 2014Rosenswig et al 2013), coupled with the increase in publicly-accessible USGS LiDAR data in the United States (Pluckhahn and Thompson 2012;Randall 2014), are certain to increase the pace of LiDAR integration internationally in the near future. This trend is already evident in the growing scope (Chase et al 2014) and number of projects utilizing LiDAR in North, Central, and South America.…”

Ancient Maya Regional Settlement and Inter-Site Analysis: The 2013 West-Central Belize LiDAR Survey

“…LiDAR has been used to identify archaeological remains in forested areas in Europe [28], Canada [29], and the Americas [30], although the ease of this identification varies with the kind of tree cover and the amount of modern disturbance [31][32][33]. It has subsequently become evident that LiDAR is also useful in tropical forested landscapes, as has been shown in the point cloud that was produced around Caracol, Belize [20,34,35], the piedmont zone of Chiapas, Mexico [36], and Angkor, Cambodia [37]. At Caracol, because the landscape was largely undisturbed by modern settlement, and because more than 25 years of mapping had already been undertaken at the site, it was possible to verify the accuracy of the LiDAR data with already recorded sections of residential groups [38], terraces [39], and road systems [40].…”

The Teotihuacan Anomaly: The Historical Trajectory of Urban Design in Ancient Central Mexico

“…By the Late Preclassic period, the standard Mesoamerican rectangular temple-pyramid was being built in urban centers throughout the area. The site of Izapa, Chiapas (Ekholm, 1969;Lowe, Lee, & Martínez Espinosa, 1982;Rosenswig, López-Torrijos, Antonelli, & Mendelsohn, 2013) is a typical example of a Late Preclassic city with several temple-pyramids ( Figure 2B). Figure 2.…”