Abstract
Abstract. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) became very popular in the last two decades for archaeological prospection. With the state-wide availability of ALS-data in Lower Saxony, Germany, about 48,000 km², we needed flexible and scalable approaches to process the data. First, we produced a state-wide digital terrain model (DTM) and some visualisations of it to use it in standard GIS software. Some of these visualisations are available as web maps and used for prospection also by volunteers. In a second approach, we automatically generate maps for all known archaeological objects. This is mainly used for the documentation of the 130,000 known objects in Lower Saxony, but also for object-by-object revision of the database. These Maps will also be presented in the web portal “Denkmalatlas Niedersachsen”, an open data imitative of the state Lower Saxony.In the first part of this paper, we show how the state-wide DTM and its visualisations can be calculated using tiles. In the second part, we describe the automatic map generation process. All implementations were done with ArcGIS and its scripting interface ArcPy.
Highlights
INTRODUCTIONOver 130,000 archaeological sites, from which 30,000 monuments are visible on the ground (mostly burial mounds, megalithic graves, enclosures, residential mounds, ramparts, etc.) are known in the area of Lower Saxony and documented in the archaeological information system
Over 130,000 archaeological sites, from which 30,000 monuments are visible on the ground are known in the area of Lower Saxony and documented in the archaeological information system
SUMMARY & OUTLOOK The state-wide Airborne laser scanning (ALS) dataset for the first time allows successfully documenting all prehistoric archaeological structures and existing damages on the still remaining monuments
Summary
Over 130,000 archaeological sites, from which 30,000 monuments are visible on the ground (mostly burial mounds, megalithic graves, enclosures, residential mounds, ramparts, etc.) are known in the area of Lower Saxony and documented in the archaeological information system. With the availability of a state-wide airborne laser scanning dataset provided by LGLN (Lower Saxony’s mapping agency) in 2018/2019 it became possible to explore these objects from distance. With automatic snapshots of the point cloud or of the digital terrain model (DTM) and with automatically generated maps it is possible to document the exact state, shape and extend of all known and visible historical man-made structures in the terrain. As part of open data Initiative of the state Lower Saxony, the catalogue of culture heritage is made available to the public in the online portal “Denkmalatlas Niedersachsen” (denkmalatlas.niedersachsen.de). With the automatically generated visualisations, the monuments can be conveyed more clearly to the general public
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