Lidar Research in the US Southwest

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

From the depths of the ocean to the far reaches of space, lidar has come a long way since its inception in the 1960s. As one of the most transformative and versatile technologies, lidar has revolutionized the way we conceptualize our shared humanity. Lidar’s ability to penetrate dense vegetation and tree canopies reveals hidden topography making it an invaluable tool for identifying and researching previously unknown features including ancient irrigation systems, agricultural terraces, settlements, road networks, and much more. These data greatly expand our ability to reconstruct how peoples managed resources and organized social, economic, ritual, and political systems through time and across space. This symposium explores current lidar research in the present-day northern US Southwest to provide current insights on methodological applications, data sovereignty, cultural heritage preservation, land management, social networks, community formation and dissolution, agricultural production, and how past peoples manifested cosmological ideologies within their built environments.

Other Keywords
Landscape Archaeology • Remote Sensing/Geophysics • North America: Northern Southwest United States

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-11 of 11)

  • Documents (11)
Documents
  • Another Step Forward: What We Didn't See Before LiDAR (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Fred Nials.

    This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> A distinctive system of terrain modification consisting of large areas of near-invisible, widely-spaced, quasi-parallel linear ridges (berms) was first identified by Hurst and Willian in 2014 during archaeological survey. Despite an apparent association with a Puebloan road and great house, questions about the age and origin of the originally...

  • The Application of Lidar in the Documentation and Protection of Chacoan Great Houses (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Shanna Diederichs.

    This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chacoan great houses, dating to the tenth and eleventh centuries AD, are one of the most impressive and enigmatic categories of Ancestral Pueblo architecture in the Southwest. Affordable and convenient lidar scanning applications now allow us to generate extraordinary images and scaled interactive models of these structures. Lidar products can...

  • Beyond Hillshade: Raster Methods for Distinguishing Chacoan, Historic, and Modern Era Roads Signatures in LiDAR, Cedar Mesa, Bears Ears N.M., Utah (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie Simon.

    This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Documentation of precontact and historic roads/trails can suffer from subjective identification criteria by the average archaeologist. This is due to frequently subtle physical expressions that compromise our ability to accurately map them with consistency, and ultimately manage them. This presentation will review LiDAR data processing, analytics, and...

  • The Circle of Life: Variability and Distribution of Loop Roads in the Ancient Southwest (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Hampson.

    This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological studies of roads in the Southwest have historically concentrated on the straight roads that connect larger communities, however thanks to the increasing availability of regional LiDAR, new and unexpected dimensions of ancient infrastructure are beginning to surface. This technology has revealed an impressive number of circular...

  • The Comb Wash Great House Community in Regional Context: New Insights from Federal 1-m Lidar Data (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Winston Hurst.

    This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Comb Wash Great House was the first ancient Puebloan community center in Utah west of Comb Ridge to be formally recognized and described in the archaeological literature (W. H. Jackson 1875). It was ignored for more than a century before Owen Severance recognized and documented several Puebloan road swales there in the late 1980s. Subsequent...

  • Exploring the Limits of USGS Lidar Data (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only James Allison.

    This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the last several years, the US Geological Survey has released lidar data for southeastern Utah, including digital terrain models (dtms) with 1m resolution. The publicly-available USGS dtms are useful for examining and mapping features within archaeological sites, but the resolution is sometimes insufficient for this purpose. Working from the...

  • Ground Truthing Lidar Anomalies in the Great Sage Plain of Southeastern Utah (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Chuipka.

    This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Review of lidar data from southeastern Utah has found anomalies that some researchers have interpreted as an extensive network of prehistoric landscape modification features from the late Ancestral Puebloan occupation of the Great Sage Plain. These anomalies appear as parallel clusters of alignments on lidar, but field observations have not found them...

  • A Machine-Learning-Enabled Survey for Large Residential Ancestral Pueblo Sites Using Publicly Accessible Lidar Data (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Field.

    This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Within the past five years, the US Geological Survey’s 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) has released large swaths of lidar data across the continental United States, giving archaeologists unprecedented access to high-resolution, landscape-scale elevation data that can be used to locate, map, and visualize medium- to large-scale archaeological sites...

  • A New Look: Revisiting Archaeological Landscapes in the Central Mesa Verde Region Using Lidar (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Grant Coffey.

    This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The public release of LiDAR data by the USGS includes much of the Four Corners area of the US Southwest and has allowed for the production of high-resolution digital elevation models that enable rapid visualization of large portions of the landscape at multiple scales. As archaeologists have begun to process and explore these spatial data, new aspects...

  • To Be, Or Not To Be? Ground-Truthing LiDAR Identified Agricultural Features at a Large Ancestral Community Center in the Northern U.S. Southwest (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Ryan.

    This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Hampton Pueblo is an ancestral site located in modern-day southwest Colorado and dating to the Pueblo I though Pueblo III periods (A.D. 750-1300). With over 100 kivas, 600 surface rooms, one great kiva, and a road, this village is one of the largest and longest occupied in the central Mesa Verde region. Located near a large seep spring, deep...

  • Unveiling Ancient Roads (Ways) and the Built Environment: A Comprehensive Study of Integrating Lidar, GIS, and 3D tools to Identify, Document, and Visualize Chacoan Roads and Cultural Landscapes. (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Friedman.

    This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the vast yet intricate network of Chacoan Roads (Ways) and their surrounding cultural landscapes through the integration of advanced technologies such as LiDAR, GIS, and 3D visualization tools. By employing these cutting-edge methods, we strive to identify, document, and visualize the integration of the ancient pathways with the...