It’s only natural when starting to analyse lidar data to feel worried that your archaeological interpretations won’t be correct. This section is here to tell you why the certainty of the category you place the feature isn’t as critical as it might seem, and reassure you that your contributions are valid!
The process of assessing the historic environment from the air requires us to:
- collect data (lidar but also aerial photographs, historic maps and the existing HER records)
- identify anomalies in that data that don’t fit with the present day land use
- describe those anomalies in terms of their form and context
- then lastly think about a category for them that fits with current archaeological understanding
The team at the Champions of the Past project want you to know that the last stage, archaeological categorisation, is not a finite point representing the the end of the process but rather an ongoing interpretative task that all archaeological data are subject to.
It may seem that because we require feature data to be recorded in specific categories, that the record is static and immutable, but this is not the case. We are constantly updating, revising and expanding our understanding of the historic environment and as such our records are open to re-interpretation as new evidence comes to light.
The key thing to remember is the interpretation may change through time but the evidence we observe is key. If you take care to describe the form and context of the features you record from the lidar, future readers of the landscape can understand better how you came to your conclusions. It then matters a lot less whether your feature has the correct category label.