Airborne Laserscanning in Archaeology: Maturing Methods and Democratizing Applications
Archaeologists have been using airborne laserscanning (ALS) for over a decade in projects ranging from heritage management schemes for post-industrial uplands in the UK or state-managed forests in Germany to research on cities now obscured by tropical jun
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Abstract Archaeologists have been using airborne laserscanning (ALS) for over a decade in projects ranging from heritage management schemes for post-industrial uplands in the UK or state-managed forests in Germany to research on cities now obscured by tropical jungle canopy in Central Mexico. The basic methods for the analysis and interpretation of this data have matured considerably and data is increasing available. Building on this increasing accessibility and an established basic methodology, archaeologists are addressing a growing variety of ground conditions and research and heritage management objectives through this technology. With this diversification comes the need to adapt the basic methods used to new landscapes and types of archaeological remains, and to integrate the practice of working with ALS with diverse fieldwork and research practices.
Introduction This chapter aims reviews the current state of practice in the use of Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS), or LiDAR, in archaeology, highlighting areas of ongoing research and open questions where further work is needed. Happily, the use of Airborne Laser Scanning as a method has reached a state of relative maturity. It is broadly accepted as a basic source of extensive and detailed topographic data (Opitz and Cowley 2012) and is widely used to promote the integrated study of past and present land use and landscape modification in archaeology. The general workflow is one of data acquisition, classification, surface and bare earth terrain model creation, visualization, and interpretation. Different projects and applications may introduce variations at some or all of these steps to suit their needs, but the general workflow remains the same.
R. Opitz (&) Center for Virtualization and Applied Spatial Technologies (CVAST) and Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 M. Forte and S. Campana (eds.), Digital Methods and Remote Sensing in Archaeology, Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40658-9_2
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Looking at the specific steps in the processing chain, the current classification methods used throughout the ALS industry produce results that can be used in archaeological research. Several papers have emerged comparing different visualization methods and making recommendations for their use under various archaeological and ground cover circumstances (Štular et al. 2012; Bennett et al. 2012). Software toolkits collecting the most commonly used Digital Terrain Model (DTM) visualizations, and targeted for an archaeological audience, have been produced, and are available through the ArchaeoLandscapes Europe network (http://www.arcland.eu/outreach/software-tools) or directly from individual or institutional creators (RVT—http://iaps.zrc-sazu.si/en/rvt#v and LiVT—http:// sourceforge.net/projects/livt/). In short, the strictly methodological work in this domain has moved from the general case to special c
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