Storage Pit Prospection and Capacity Estimation in Aotearoa New Zealand: A Comparison of Surface Detection Methods

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

LiDAR has revolutionized the way we survey for surface-visible archaeological features. Our ability to relatively quickly capture and assess large landscapes for features enables us to understand human activity across large spatial scales with significantly less time and financial investment than pedestrian or other forms of remote survey alone. As these data become cheaper to collect and more readily available, surveyors have developed a number of computer processes to speed up feature prospection. Subterranean storage pits are one archaeological feature that has been subject to extensive survey in a number of different environmental and cultural contexts. Often visible from the surface as eroded, shallow depressions, accurate surface prospection methods are not only key to identifying these features across landscapes, but to understanding their distribution and sizes; this has clear implications for our understanding of their uses in the past. However, detection of surface features from remote data must balance concerns around accurate identification with time investment and spatial coverage. Storage pits, or rua, are one of the most commonly recorded archaeological features in Aotearoa New Zealand. This poster explores a number of LiDAR-based detection methods and compares pit count and dimensions against data from these, pedestrian survey, and archaeological site maps.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41571.0