Rediscovering the lost archaeological landscape of southern New England using airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR)

Johnson, Katharine M.; Ouimet, William B.

doi:10.1016/j.jas.2013.12.004

Cited by 112 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…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).…”

Section: Airborne Lidar and Landscape Archaeologymentioning

confidence: 91%

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

Opitz

Ryzewski

Cherry

et al. 2015

Journal of Field Archaeology

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This article describes what appears to be the first archaeological application of airborne LiDAR survey to historic-era landscapes in the Caribbean archipelago, on the island of Montserrat. LiDAR is proving invaluable in extending the reach of traditional pedestrian survey into less favorable areas, such as those covered by dense neotropical forest and by ashfall from the past two decades of active eruptions by the Soufriè re Hills volcano, and to sites in localities that are inaccessible on account of volcanic dangers. Emphasis is placed on two aspects of the research: first, the importance of ongoing, real-time interaction between the LiDAR analyst and the archaeological team in the field; and second, the advantages of exploiting the full potential of the three-dimensional LiDAR point cloud data for purposes of the visualization of archaeological sites and features.

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Section: Airborne Lidar and Landscape Archaeologymentioning

confidence: 91%

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

Opitz

Ryzewski

Cherry

et al. 2015

Journal of Field Archaeology

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“…As a result of this funding, NCALM was subcontracted to record 200 km The usefulness of LiDAR as an archaeological survey tool was first established in temperate forested landscapes [25][26][27]. 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].…”

Section: Caracol Lidar Surveymentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Chase

Awe

et al. 2014

Remote Sensing

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18 different sites within this region. Thus, a large body of archaeological research provides both the temporal and spatial parameters for the varied ancient Maya centers that once occupied this area; importantly, these data can be used to help interpret the collected LiDAR data. The goal of the 2013 LiDAR campaign was to gain information on the distribution of ancient Maya settlement and sites on the landscape and, particularly, to determine how the landscape was used between known centers. The data that were acquired through the 2013 LiDAR campaign have significance for interpreting both the composition and limits of ancient Maya political units. This paper presents the initial results of these new data and suggests a developmental model for ancient Maya polities.

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“…Hysteresis is used to track along the remaining pixels that have not been suppressed. For thresholding, the magnitude of an edge was computed by Equation (9). Hysteresis uses two thresholds (T1 and T2, satisfying T1 < T2) and if the magnitude was below the first threshold, it was set to zero (made a non-edge).…”

Section: Edge Detection: Canny Edge Detector (Ced)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Soil marks can appear on bare soil changing in color, shape, or texture [1,2]. In order to identify these buried archaeological features, different types of remote sensing imagery have been used including aerial photographs [1,3,4], spaceborne and airborne RADAR images [5][6][7], airborne LIDAR images [8,9], as well as imaging spectroscopy [10][11][12][13]. Recently, archaeologists interested in detecting archaeological features are increasingly employing very high resolution (VHR) commercial satellite imagery [14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automated Extraction of the Archaeological Tops of Qanat Shafts from VHR Imagery in Google Earth

et al. 2014

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Qanats in northern Xinjiang of China provide valuable information for agriculturists and anthropologists who seek fundamental understanding of the distribution of qanat water supply systems with regard to water resource utilization, the development of oasis agriculture, and eventually climate change. Only the tops of qanat shafts (TQSs), indicating the course of the qanats, can be observed from space, and their circular archaeological traces can also be seen in very high resolution imagery in Google Earth. The small size of the TQSs, vast search regions, and degraded features make manually extracting them from remote sensing images difficult and costly. This paper proposes an automated TQS extraction method that adopts mathematical morphological processing methods before an edge detecting module is used in the circular Hough transform approach. The accuracy OPEN ACCESSRemote Sens. 2014, 6 11957 assessment criteria for the proposed method include: (i) extraction percentage (E) = 95.9%, branch factor (B) = 0 and quality percentage (Q) = 95.9% in Site 1; and (ii) extraction percentage (E) = 83.4%, branch factor (B) = 0.058 and quality percentage (Q) = 79.5% in Site 2. Compared with the standard circular Hough transform, the quality percentages (Q) of our proposed method were improved to 95.9% and 79.5% from 86.3% and 65.8% in test sites 1 and 2, respectively. The results demonstrate that wide-area discovery and mapping can be performed much more effectively based on our proposed method.

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Rediscovering the lost archaeological landscape of southern New England using airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR)

Cited by 112 publications

References 27 publications

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

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

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

Automated Extraction of the Archaeological Tops of Qanat Shafts from VHR Imagery in Google Earth

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