Photogrammetric Registration of Excavation and Sacbe Segments at Yaxuna

Summary

Using aerial imagery in archaeological sites has been viewed as a powerful tool for site recordation. At the Maya site of Yaxuna, located 20km south of the ancient ruins of Chichen Itza and on the longest recorded Maya sacbe, we provide a case study of aerial survey work, combining altitude varying imagery from fixed wing and multirotor aircrafts. Combining such multi-scale imagery allows us to relate excavation scale to landscape wide architecture and layout. Features such as terrain, monumental and residential architecture, can be made more visible in a broader context through derivative products from photogrammetry, including but not limited to digital elevation models, watersheds, hillshades and vegetation color. At the site of Yaxuna, we use orthomosaic and photogrammetric registration to contextualize residential buildings with the sacbe which links to the sites of Ekal and Coba. The notable importance of the sacbe was highlighted by past exchange of people, goods and ideas between these communities, and is now pronounced by physical features in construction architecture and physical layout. Results are used to illustrate the major advantage of using aerial imaging for rapid extraction of site-wide architectural layouts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21886