Several people have forwarded an article link about LIDAR from National Geographic Online. Great technology and I look forward to examining LIDAR maps.
Unfortunately the authors begin by knowing what they will find. So they are not likely to see anything else in pictures.
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This is about rock piles and stone mound sites in New England. A balance is needed between keeping them secret and making them public. Also arrowheads, stone tools and other surface archaeology.
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The Indigenous "Era" gets dismissed quickly in national geographic: Native Americans didn't leave behind walls and foundations in New England. LiDAR can't tell us as much directly about their era. We can look for sites where they may have left a mark on the landscape." I like much better the thought at Secret Landscapes: "The LiDAR scan of the farmstead shows some rounded structures that could be rock piles." And when I look at the photos of the "stone walls" at Ceremonial Landscapes, not too far from NatGeo photo, I wonder what those supposedly post-contact "walls" look like on the ground.
ReplyDeleteAnd as far as "Can you imagine a Maya archaeologist looking at your LiDAR readings and speculating on the "collapse" of New England's civilization?" goes, I think a "Maya Archaeologist" would understand the pre-contact sustainable human tended agroforest and the collapse of the non-sustainable post contact system much better than the author of the article.
ReplyDeleteUnder the heading of What Are The Limitations?
ReplyDelete"Native Americans didn't leave behind walls and foundations in New England. LiDAR can't tell us as much directly about their era. We can look for sites where they may have left a mark on the landscape."
I strongly disagree, I guess you have to know what you're looking for. I've found Native American stone work on Google Maps and Bing as I am sure many readers of this blog have found also....
The best LIDAR scans today have a maximum resolution of about 1 meter. Unless a stonewall, stone pile, earthen mound or ditch, cellar hole has sufficient size especially vertical height or depth differences, it rarely shows up on LIDAR maps. I base this upon personal experience working with these maps. Aerial photos taken in the late fall or early winter are generally far more useful to identifying stone walls.
ReplyDeleteThe better know archaeological studies that made us of aerial based imagery and mapping took place at sites without tree cover. Tree cover and the shadows cast by trees sometimes make interpreting aerial photos in New England a bit tricky. The LIDAR maps in New England have all gone through complex computer based "filtering" process to remove all the reflected signal from the tree canopy.