Lidar Vegetation Analysis and Ground Truthing Efficacy at the Maya Archaeological Site of El Palmar, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

An essential component of analyzing lidar data is adapting them to the researcher’s specific environmental situation, including the effects of local vegetation types on the identification of archaeological features. Doing so, can refine estimates of existing structures in non-surveyed areas and inform improved ground survey strategies in the future. At the Maya site of El Palmar, Mexico, we conducted a ground-truthing survey of different vegetation types associated with features initially digitized using a 94 km2 lidar image and those newly discovered during fieldwork. These data were then compared to raster images developed to model vegetative cover based on factors such as vegetation height, density, and ground point returns. While the majority of vegetation types presented few obstacles to visibility in our case, we found that the most problematic types of cover were easily identified from the Lidar image itself. These results allowed us not only to evaluate the validity of raster vegetation models but also to compare methods for identifying less accurate areas of the Lidar image, creating more efficient survey plans that do not require time-consuming analyses of point-cloud datasets.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24256