The application of airborne mapping LiDAR for the documentation of ancient cities and regions in tropical regions

Fisher, Christopher T.; Cohen, Anna S.; Fernández-Diaz, Juan Carlos; Leisz, Stephen J.

doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2016.08.050

Cited by 53 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Lidar, also commonly referred to as airborne laser scanning (ALS) has now been in relatively wide use in archaeology for over a decade (Chase et al 2011;Devereux et al 2005;Fisher et al 2017;Harmon et al 2006;Opitz & Cowley 2012;Doneus et al 2013;Vinci & Bernadini 2017). The impacts of the increasing availability of this data are clear, including the discovery of large quantities of previously unrecorded sites and features across the landscape, a renewed interest in the study of the topographic context of sites and landscape features, an increased integration of geomorphological studies in archaeological projects, an intensification of interest in woodland landscapes and the archaeology of woodlands and a growing number of projects targeting uplands and other non-agricultural areas that were previously considered prohibitively costly or labour intensive to survey.…”

Section: Lidarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent Trends and Long-standing Problems in Archaeological Remote Sensing

Opitz

Herrmann

2018

Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology

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The variety and sophistication of data sources, sensors, and platforms employed in archaeological remote sensing have increased significantly over the past decade. Projects incorporating data from UAV surveys, regional and research-driven lidar surveys, the uptake of hyperspectral imaging, the launch of high-temporal revisit satellites, the advent of multi-sensor rigs for geophysical survey, and increased use of structure from motion mean that more archaeologists are engaging with remote sensing than ever. These technological advances continue to drive research in the specialist community and provide reasons for optimism about future applications, but many social and technical obstacles to the integration of remote sensing into archaeological research and heritage management remain. This article addresses the challenges of contemporary archaeological remote sensing by briefly reviewing trends and then focusing on providing a critical overview of the main structural problems. The discussion here concentrates on topics that have dominated the discourse in recent archaeological literature and featured prominently in ongoing fieldwork for the past decade across three broad segments of landscape archaeology: data collection in the field, the current state of data access and archives, and processing and interpretation.

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Section: Lidarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent Trends and Long-standing Problems in Archaeological Remote Sensing

Opitz

Herrmann

2018

Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology

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“…It is particularly efficient in forested or complex environmental contexts, where sites are inaccessible and poorly documented. Since 2009, various initiatives have demonstrated the potential of this tool for Mesoamerica and Central America (e.g., Canuto et al 2018; Chase et al 2016; Fisher et al 2016, 2017; Golden et al 2016; Hutson 2015; Prufer et al 2015; Rosenswig et al 2015; von Schwerin et al 2016). Although the area covered by each project varies considerably (Chase et al [2016] record areas ranging from 9 to 1,057 km 2 for flights conducted in Mesoamerica between 2009 and 2015), all archaeologists face similar, yet important, challenges when approaching this type of data.…”

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confidence: 99%

Testing Web Mapping and Active Learning to Approach Lidar Data

Forest

Costa

Combey

et al. 2019

Adv. archaeol. pract.

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After acquiring 91 km2 of lidar data from the Zacapu region, West Mexico, we confronted a series of issues that most archaeologists using this technology face. These include the large volume of data available, the limited training of potential “analysts,” the difficult development of a collective mapping tool and protocol, and the reliability of desk-based interpretation of archaeological features. In this article, we present an initiative conducted in 2015 and 2017 as an attempt to answer these methodological and pedagogical issues. We developed a web mapping platform to collectively interpret archaeological features using lidar-derived imagery and to train volunteer students to participate in this desk-based web mapping within a crowdsourcing framework. After evaluating the results of this initiative, we discuss the potential and limitations of this method for both lidar-based research and future training.

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“…Scholars have employed satellite imagery to enhance the visibility of architecture and site boundaries (Garrison et al 2008;Lasaponara et al 2011;Masini et al 2008;Parcak 2007;Saturno et al 2006;Sever and Irwin 2003), document site destruction (Bewley et al 2016;Casana and Laugier 2017;Casana and Panahipour 2014;Contreras and Brodie 2010;Fradley and Sheldrick 2017;Parcak 2007;Parcak et al 2016), and map previously undocumented landscapes in extensive areas using both expert-led and automated classifications (Casana 2014;Menze and Ur 2012;Ur 2013aUr , 2013b. Airborne lidar has revealed vast areas of archaeological sites and features and generated particularly stunning results in forested landscapes (Chase et al 2012(Chase et al , 2011Evans et al 2013;Fisher et al 2017;Fisher and Leisz 2013;Golden et al 2016;Henry, Shields, and Kidder 2019;Johnson and Ouimet 2014;Opitz et al 2015). Indeed, Chase and colleagues (2012, 12916) argue that airborne lidar is sparking a paradigm shift in archaeological interpretation, particularly in lowland Mesoamerica, where it is operating as a "a catalytic enabler of rapid transformational change in archaeological research and interpretation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Big Archaeology: Horizons and Blindspots

VanValkenburgh

Dufton

2020

Journal of Field Archaeology

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Big data have arrived in archaeology, in the form of both large-scale datasets themselves and in the analytics and approaches of data science. Aerial data collected from satellite-, airborne-and UAVmounted sensors have been particularly transformational, allowing us to capture more sites and features, over larger areas, at greater resolution, and in formerly inaccessible landscapes. However, these new means of collecting, processing, and visualizing datasets also present fresh challenges for archaeologists. What kinds of questions are these methods suited to answer, and where do they fall short? How do they articulate with the work of collecting smaller scale and lower resolution data? How are our relationships with "local" communities impacted by working at the scales of entire provinces, nation-states, and continents? This themed issue seeks to foster a conversation about how the unprecedented expansion of archaeological site detection, the globalization of archaeological data structures and databases, and the use of high-resolution aerial datasets are changing both the way archaeologists envision the past and the way we work in the present. In our introduction to the issue, presented here, we outline a series of conceptual and ethical issues posed by big data approaches in archaeology and provide an overview of how the nine essays that comprise this volume each address them.

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The application of airborne mapping LiDAR for the documentation of ancient cities and regions in tropical regions

Cited by 53 publications

References 45 publications

Recent Trends and Long-standing Problems in Archaeological Remote Sensing

Recent Trends and Long-standing Problems in Archaeological Remote Sensing

Testing Web Mapping and Active Learning to Approach Lidar Data

Big Archaeology: Horizons and Blindspots

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