Abstract
As a response to Hurricane Mitch and the resulting widespread loss of life and destruction of Honduran infrastructure in 1998, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) conducted the first wide-area airborne lidar topographic mapping project in Central America. The survey was executed by the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin (BEG) in 2000, and it was intended to cover 240 square kilometers distributed among 15 flood-prone communities throughout Honduras. The original data processing produced basic digital elevation models at 1.5-meter grid spacing which were used as inputs for hydrological modeling. The USGS published the results in a series of technical reports in 2002. The authors became interested in this dataset in 2013 while searching for geospatial data that would provide additional context and comparative references for an archaeological lidar project conducted in 2012 in the Honduran Mosquitia. After multiple requests to representatives from the USGS and BEG, we found various types of processed data in personal and institutional archives, culminating in the identification of 8-mm magnetic tapes that contained the original point clouds. Point clouds for the 15 communities plus a test area centered on the Maya site of Copan were recovered from the tapes (16 areas totaling 700 km2). These point clouds have been reprocessed by the authors using contemporary software and methods into higher resolution and fidelity products. Within these new products, we have identified and mapped multiple archaeological sites in proximity to modern cities, many of which are not part of the official Honduran site registry. Besides improving our understanding of ancient Honduras, our experiences dealing with issues of data management and access, ethics, and international collaboration have been informative. This paper summarizes our experiences in the hope that they will contribute to the discussion and development of best practices for handling geospatial datasets of archaeological value.
Highlights
The application of airborne mapping lidar, known as airborne laser scanning (ALS), for archaeological prospection was recognized in European settings in the early 2000s (Barnes 2003; Bewley, Crutchley & Shell 2005; Shell & Roughley 2004), but it was not until 2009 that the technique saw its first archaeological applications in densely vegetated tropical regions such as in Central America and Southeast Asia (Chase et al 2011; Evans et al 2013; Fisher et al 2016)
While a few archaeological projects have used data collected for other purposes (Golden et al 2016; Johnson & Ouimet 2014), the work presented here is different because: 1) the data were already 17 years old when we accessed them in 2017 and they were collected with the first generation of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) sensors, and the data had to be located, resurrected, and reprocessed; 2) these data represent a random sample of a large area of Honduras, including diverse regions for which there has been limited systematic archaeological work; 3) they represent a snapshot in time from which we can trace whether archaeological settlements have been destroyed or modified by environmental and infrastructural changes
In November 2013, we accessed another set of rasters designated by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) as “all points” (AP) that were generated by interpolating the elevations of the returns
Summary
The application of airborne mapping lidar, known as airborne laser scanning (ALS), for archaeological prospection was recognized in European settings in the early 2000s (Barnes 2003; Bewley, Crutchley & Shell 2005; Shell & Roughley 2004), but it was not until 2009 that the technique saw its first archaeological applications in densely vegetated tropical regions such as in Central America and Southeast Asia (Chase et al 2011; Evans et al 2013; Fisher et al 2016). While a few archaeological projects have used data collected for other purposes (Golden et al 2016; Johnson & Ouimet 2014), the work presented here is different because: 1) the data were already 17 years old when we accessed them in 2017 and they were collected with the first generation of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) sensors, and the data had to be located, resurrected, and reprocessed; 2) these data represent a random sample of a large area of Honduras, including diverse regions for which there has been limited systematic archaeological work; 3) they represent a snapshot in time from which we can trace whether archaeological settlements have been destroyed or modified by environmental and infrastructural changes. From Resurrecting and Repurposing Lidar Data for Archaeology Research in Honduras points emphasizing the relevance and challenges of working with legacy geospatial data, and with archaeological lidar in particular
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