Woot There It Is: Ground-Truthing LiDAR Survey Results at El Peru-Waka’, Petén, Guatemala

Summary

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

In 2016, a 91 square kilometer lidar survey was completed of the region surrounding the Classic Maya center of El Peru-Waka’, as part of the PACUNAM LiDAR Initiative. Visual analysis was then conducted from 2017-2018 by members of the Waka’ Archaeological Project (PAW) to identify new and previously recorded structures and other settlement features visible in the LiDAR DEM. During the 2018 PAW field season, pedestrian ground-truthing of a 30 km section of the LiDAR DEM was carried out to confirm the earlier visual analysis. Over the course of the field season, the ground-truthing team was able to visit 126 groups to the west and south of the El Peru-Waka’ site core. Although many features were clearly visible in the LiDAR data, the survey team also recorded numerous false positives and false negatives. This poster will present the preliminary results of this research and the impact of false positives and false negatives on evaluating structure density estimates based on LiDAR surveys in the Maya lowlands.

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): 26231