LiDAR (Other Keyword)
76-100 (124 Records)
Archaeological applications of geographic information systems and remote sensing technologies are becoming increasingly popular, especially in regard to site prospection and the geospatial analysis of cultural features. Utilizing aerial LiDAR and high-resolution satellite imagery of North Dakota, a training data set was used to define the boundaries and characteristics for certain morphological features of anthropogenic origin, which include mounds, earth lodge depressions, and fortification...
A post-glacial relative sea level curve and paleoshoreline archaeological survey for the Prince Rupert Harbour, BC, Canada (2017)
We present a relative sea level (RSL) curve for the Prince Rupert Harbour area for the last 15,000 years that is based on nearly 150 radiocarbon-dated data points. RSL dropped from at least 50 m asl to several m below current sea level immediately after deglaciation, before rising again to 4-6 m asl during the early Holocene. By 6000 years ago RSL had approached its current position, though there have been some late Holocene fluctuations. We used this RSL history in conjunction with...
Potential Method for Structure Alignment by the Ancient Maya (2018)
It is well established that the ancient Maya favored certain orientations for the buildings in their major urban centers. In the southern Maya lowlands, an orientation of 14° clockwise from the cardinal directions is particularly common. How did the ancient Maya find this orientation? What was their surveying technique? Lidar from many sites shows that this orientation was not limited to major constructions. The smallest residential structures and patio groups, structures spread throughout the...
Predictive Modeling of Paleoindian and Archaic Sites across Florida with GIS (2018)
Florida’s terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene archaeological sites form interesting settlement patterns when projected upon various geographic representations. Probably many unknown Paleoindian and Early Archaic sites still remain hidden and unstudied, as more than half of Florida’s landmass was inundated during these cultural periods. Due to constraints in visibility and access, the practical limits of traditional survey hinder progress in discovering additional sites around the state. With...
Preliminary Lidar-Based Analyses of Naachtun Settlement Patterns and Land Use (2017)
Located in the northern Petén, Guatemala, the Maya site of Naachtun has been investigated since 2010 by a pluri-disciplinary French-Guatemalan team. Some of its goals aim to reconstruct the political history of the site and its spatial evolution through time, and to understand the management of local resources and the impact of anthropic activities on the landscape. Archaeological and environmental excavations and studies have been carried out in the city center and surroundings areas while a...
Preparing for the Great War: How Lidar and GPR Helped Locate Military Training Resources (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Application of Geophysical Techniques to Military Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To date, no comprehensive study examining World War I training had been available for the Department of Defense (DoD). In 2017, the Alabama National Guard partnered with the Mississippi National Guard and Panamerican Consultants on a DoD Legacy Resources Management Program project (CR 18-834) to synthesize existing research...
Que Linda Vista! The first glance at LiDAR from Northwestern Belize. (2017)
In this paper, we offer a first look at the results of a LiDAR survey of northwestern Belize performed by the National Center for Aerial Laser Mapping in July, 2016. Three survey blocks were defined – one centered on the site of Xnoha near the Mexican border and another along the Rio Hondo corridor from near its headwaters to Chetumal Bay. The third and largest, covers the sites of La Milpa and Blue Creek as well as numerous ditched agricultural areas. At the time of submission, only the first...
The rapid generation and visualization of 3D timelapse reconstructions of the excavation at the Paleolithic site Arma Veirana in Italy. (2017)
Arma Veirana is a Middle/Upper Paleolithic cave site of the Maritime Alps of Liguria, Italy, which has the potential to offer insight into the interaction between Modern Humans and the Neandertals. Preliminary excavations have shown a continuous occupation between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic time periods, yet the complexity of the cave morphology and geology have made it difficult to isolate erosion as well as environmental and non-natural factors to understand the full image of hominin...
Recent Investigations of Maya Archaeological Site Looting in Petén, Guatemala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological looting in the Maya area has been an enduring concern for over 60 years. While many individual archaeological projects have worked diligently to record looting within their respective project areas, the recent application of lidar in archaeology facilitates the large-scale study of illicit digging in the forested Maya region for the first...
Recent Research on the Formative and Early Classic Periods in the Yaxhom Valley, Yucatán (2018)
Previous investigations by the Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project demonstrated that the Valle de Yaxhom, in the Puuc region of Yucatan, was a significant locus of monumental construction during the latter Middle Formative and early Late Formative. Two large acropoli, the Acropolis Yaxhom and the Acropolis Lakin, were previously mapped and tested, but the nature of accompanying residential construction remained unknown. Two other sites with megalithic architecture, Nucuchtunich and Nohoch...
Refining Airborne Laser Scanning Data to See Through Mayapán's Dense Vegetation (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I present a workflow for optimizing the classification of airborne laser scanning point data and the selection of appropriate surface visualization techniques to improve the identification of archaeological and environmental features at the Postclassic city of Mayapán. The initial 2013 digital elevation model enabled the identification of thousands of...
Remote Sensing Remote Islands: Error Analysis of Lidar-Based Archaeological Survey of the Small Cycladic Islands, Greece (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cyclades, Greece, are islands with well-documented histories of human occupation and use. Among the larger islands in the archipelago there are many small, currently uninhabited islets with referenced land-use histories, including for agriculture and pasturage (goat islands). Despite these references, there have been few archaeological investigations...
Reorienting Frontiers and Borderlands: Recent Research on the Usumacinta River (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Frontiers and borderlands are often conceptualized as places of precarity, where uncertainty characterizes communities outside the purview of authority. In contrast, borders evoke the presence of a reinforced authority where physical and political structures have been put in place to fortify a territory. However, these approaches often simplify or distill...
Retracing the Middlebrook Encampments of the American Revolutionary War: A Cartographic Analysis (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Revisiting Revolutionary America" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Continental Army occupied a strategic section of the Watchung Mountains of New Jersey during the spring of 1777 and winter of 1778-79. More than 5,000 soldiers were encamped over a 10-square-mile area of Washington Valley in Somerset County. During what is known as the Middlebrook Encampments, the soldiers modified the terrain in this...
Retracing the Past: Documenting the Historic Hampshire and Hampden Canal (2024)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the spring of 2022, SWCA Environmental Consultants (SWCA) conducted an archaeological reconnaissance survey on behalf of the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission (PVPC) as part of an ongoing, multi-town effort to document and map the approximately 30-mile-long, nineteenth century Hampshire and Hampden Canal. Archaeologists were able to develop a modernized approach for this effort by...
Risk Assessment of Archaeological Sites Using Lidar: Sea level Rise Modeling at Jamestown Island, VA (2017)
Jamestown Island contains low-lying terrain with archaeological sites, known and unknown, threatened by sea level rise. Using data acquired from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) was created using a Light Detection and Ranging Remote Sensing technique (LIDAR) to identify cultural sites and assist in planning for cultural remediation. Four scenarios of sea level rise modeling were created based on historic trends and projected environmental events...
The Ruins of a Plantation-Era Landscape: Using LiDAR and Pedestrian Survey to Locate Montserrat’s 17th-19th Century Colonial Past. (2016)
The Caribbean island of Montserrat’s historic and prehistoric cultural history is threatened by volcanic activity, modern development, and the natural processes accompanying mountainous, tropical environments. Survey and Landscape Archaeology on Montserrat (SLAM) aims to document the nature and location of archaeological sites to inform our understanding of the island’s colonial landscape. Because many areas are not easily accessible, SLAM conducted a hybrid survey process utilizing LiDAR...
Say It with Flowers: Recording African-American Gardening Traditions Using Terrestrial LiDAR and Oral History (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Technology and Public Outreach" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. African-American gardening traditions involving such features as wheels, bottle trees, mirros, and silvered statuary have been identified across the United States. What are not always included in analyses of these gardens are the significance of flowers and other plantings or the changes within a garden over time. Together, terrestrial LiDAR and...
Sculpting a Mississippian Aztalan: A Landscape Perspective (2017)
The culmination of over a century of research at the Aztalan site in south-central Wisconsin has highlighted the drastic extent of landscape modification by the site’s inhabitants. Notably, with the arrival of Middle Mississippians by the end of the 11th century A.D. these modifications included construction of earthen platform mounds, formal plazas, and landscape reclamation. Utilizing publicly available LiDAR derived surface data for Jefferson County, Wisconsin, this poster presents a summary...
Site Map Validation and Quantifying Linkages between Multispectral and Lidar Remote Sensing for Settlement Pattern Mapping (2017)
Fifteen years of field survey and image processing of commercial satellite optical data have contributed to robust site maps of San Bartolo and Xultun, among other PROSABA sites in northeastern Peten. The recent acquisition of lidar-derived DSM and DTM data through PACUNAM has made new types of analyses possible, including the validation and enhancement of the site maps. We present recent mapping discoveries in the PROSABA region and research into the validation and extrapolation of settlement...
Snake Chaps and Shapefiles: Public LiDAR as a Tool for Archaeological Exploration in Mid-Atlantic Wetlands (2017)
The Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina was home to disenfranchised Native Americans, enslaved canal company laborers and maroons who lived in the wetlands temporarily and long term ca. 1660-1860. In the past decade, the Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study (GDSLS) has intensively investigated only a few maroon and enslaved labor sites, leaving vast swaths of inhospitable and challenging swampland archaeologically unexplored. Current research seeks to identify new sites in remote...
Spatial and Small-scale Geoarchaeological Analysis of a Middle Archaic Antelope Trap in Northeastern Nevada, U.S.A. (2015)
Great Basin Antelope Traps are ideal laboratories due to their feature system level focus on one set of subsistence behaviors (antelope hunting). By combining data collected using LiDAR, GPS and GIS, our analysis in the Liza Jane Trap focused on the spatial patterning of lithic artifacts and the location of small-scale landforms. The geoarchaeological analysis indicates relatively stable landforms modified by cultural-transforms. Analysis to locate small-scale landforms was performed to locate...
Statecraft, Politics, and Kingship in the Northern Maya Lowlands, with a Focus on the Puuc Region (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the nature of northern Maya lowland statecraft, politics, and kingship and how they differ and parallel that of the southern lowlands. In keeping with the goal of the symposium this paper focuses on the concept of “regime” recognizing the Maya, especially when considering the northern and southern areas, created distinct political...
"A Strange Sort of Warfare Underground": Mines and Countermines on the Petersburg Front, 1864 (2016)
Petersburg, Virginia, is known for the mine explosion that destroyed a Confederate fort and initiated the Battle of the Crater. This was not the only mining effort on the siege line. Even before the July 30, 1864, explosion, the Confederate defenders of Petersburg constructed countermines in places where the terrain was susceptible to underground enemy approaches. The use of LIDAR imagery, map and photographic analysis, documentary research and field survey has revealed two extensive sets of...
Ten Years of Archaeology at the Local Level in Prince George’s County, Maryland (2016)
In November 2015, Prince George’s County, Maryland celebrates the ten year anniversary of the passage of local regulations that require review of all subdivision applications for their effect on archaeological resources. This paper will examine the results of ten years of archaeological investigations under the local regulations, lessons learned from these efforts, and future directions. Various techniques, such as conservation easements and the conveyance of sites to entities such as the...