Now you’ve got a handle on the technology we need to focus on how we use lidar to help us read the landscape and identify features of archaeological interest.
The lidar models themselves represent the landscape at the moment the survey was undertaken. They are not attuned to only show the historical or archaeological features that are our main interest for the Champions of the Past project. To identify these features we need to read the landscape, to understand what is modern and what is natural or geological. Only through this process of careful assessment can we begin to make sense of the landscape data and add to our understanding of how it was used in the past.
In this section we will look first at the traditions of aerial prospection in archaeology and how we have learnt to identify archaeological features from aerial images. We will look at what lidar adds to the picture but also at the sort of features cannot be detected in the lidar models.
Click on Archaeology from the Air to get started.
Once you have completed all the steps in this lesson, remember to scroll to the bottom of this page to click the ‘Mark Complete’ button and continue to the next lesson.