Digital Dig Kits: Portable Affordable Archaeology for Twenty-First-Century Fieldwork

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent advances in lidar technologies have been profound for archaeology, amplifying the subdiscipline of digital archaeology. However, lidar units, both aerial and terrestrial, have remained cost prohibitive until recent products by Apple including the iPad and iPhone Pro series. These products are among the first consumer electronic devices with built-in lidar sensors capable of collecting point cloud data. This poster examines the applicability of the iPhone lidar sensor in archaeology drawing on three case studies from the Classic Maya Lowlands. First, we compare the iPhone lidar with traditional methods of plan view drawings of archaeological excavation levels from Ix Kuku’il in southern Belize. Second, in Honduras, we compare the iPhone lidar captures of previously excavated tunnels in the Copan Acropolis with high-resolution 3D models developed from TopCon total station data. Third, we compare the iPhone and Faro Focus 3D, a terrestrial lidar unit, point clouds captured on an ancient Maya building façade at Copan comparing the quality, density, and noise of the two systems. While there are advantages and disadvantages to using iPhone lidar, the speed, accuracy, and simplicity outweigh the drawbacks, making it a useful tool that complements traditional field methods in any archaeologist’s toolkit.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36813.0