Ground Truthing Lidar Anomalies in the Great Sage Plain of Southeastern Utah

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.

Review of lidar data from southeastern Utah has found anomalies that some researchers have interpreted as an extensive network of prehistoric landscape modification features from the late Ancestral Puebloan occupation of the Great Sage Plain. These anomalies appear as parallel clusters of alignments on lidar, but field observations have not found them to present themselves very clearly. In some cases the anomalies are not observable on the ground at all, while more subtle features such as prehistoric road swales can be traced. Woods Canyon has used a variety of imagery sources on projects in the region, including lidar. Over the past five years, Woods Canyon has conducted several thousand acres of survey in areas where these and other lidar anomalies occur and we have been able to observe hundreds of prospective locations where they are mapped. This paper presents background on the subject and provides a review of fieldwork observations. It will also include possible explanations of some of these anomalies as well as suggestions for archaeological testing to evaluate whether these features are natural, cultural, or possibly artifacts of lidar imaging.

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): 51197