Amerindian archaeological site DEM construction and analysis from UAV flights
Author(s): Menno Hoogland; Till Sonnemann; Eduardo Herrera Malatesta; Corinne L. Hofman; Jorge Ulloa Hung
Year: 2015
Summary
The archaeological footprint of Caribbean pre-Columbian settlements is often subtle; limited to surface scatter of shell, lithic and ceramic material. In the northern Dominican Republic, slight differences in topography have been identified as additional evidence for Amerindian habitation sites.
Circular platforms from 7 to 10 meters in diameter, were dug into the hill slope and levelled to form the base of round houses, as shown in recent excavations by the Nexus1492 project. The terraced settlements on the flanks of hills provided inter-visibility between villages, and the opportunity to observe the sea, but were located away from the main food source, fish and molluscs, and even fresh water.
In combination with terrestrial surveys, aerial mapping of the site complements our understanding of configuration and extent of this settlement type in its environment. Improved usability and price drop of unmanned aerial vehicles and easy use of photogrammetric software provides the opportunity to record archaeological features.
Produced from vertical and oblique aerial photos, the created DEMs highlight the small topographic changes even beneath low canopy. The result provides the possibility to extract contours, shading, small topography changes, and its implementation in a GIS environment and coarser DEMs for regional aspect analysis.
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Cite this Record
Amerindian archaeological site DEM construction and analysis from UAV flights. Till Sonnemann, Menno Hoogland, Corinne L. Hofman, Eduardo Herrera Malatesta, Jorge Ulloa Hung. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 397007)
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Keywords
General
local scale
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Photogrammegtry
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UAV
Geographic Keywords
Caribbean
Spatial Coverage
min long: -90.747; min lat: 3.25 ; max long: -48.999; max lat: 27.683 ;