The Application of Lidar in the Documentation and Protection of Chacoan Great Houses

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Lidar Research in the US Southwest" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Chacoan great houses, dating to the tenth and eleventh centuries AD, are one of the most impressive and enigmatic categories of Ancestral Pueblo architecture in the Southwest. Affordable and convenient lidar scanning applications now allow us to generate extraordinary images and scaled interactive models of these structures. Lidar products can contribute to our understanding and protection of the Chacoan built environment but to do so they must be applied systematically and made accessible to descendant communities and cultural heritage managers. This paper discusses the integration of lidar into the Intermountain Region National Park Service Architectural Documentation process, which is designed to contextualize architectural elements within the layered history of a great house and the built environment of Chaco. The documentation package also captures and quantifies acute and long-term deterioration threats and provides a platform for comprehensive conservation planning. Lidar models can contribute to every stage of this process. In short, lidar is changing our perception of Chacoan great houses and it is up to us to ensure the application of this tool is used to capture the intricacies and significance of these structures and to protect and preserve them in culturally competent ways.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Lidar Research in the US Southwest

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51198