Detecting Mounds Using Airborne LiDAR: Case Studies from Iowa and Minnesota

Summary

Between 2009 and 2012, researchers at the the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA) conducted a number of pilot studies in the application of airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) to find and map prehistoric burial mounds. Studies were conducted in Iowa and Minnesota, two states that have invested in high quality, statewide LiDAR data. These studies began with the master's thesis research of OSA GIS specialist, Melanie Riley, and included the NCPTT-funded development of LiDAR Surveyor, a GIS-based model that processed LiDAR data looking for the characteristic conical topography of mounds. The studies have demonstrated that publicly-available LiDAR data from Iowa and Minnesota are capable of detecting mounds only 30 cm in height. We have found that LiDAR successfully detects a relatively high percentage of mounds known to exist at previously recorded sites. LiDAR Surveyor has proven successful at identifying previously unknown mounds, and is able to weed out "false positives," although we have found that field confirmation of results, no matter the method used, is absolutely essential.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• 20 Year Retrospective of National Center for Preservation Technology and Training sponsored Archaeology.

Keywords

Spatial Coverage