Jesús García Sánchez (recipient of three LASmoons)
Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization (LERC) project
Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Background:
Our project Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization (LERC) has been studying the hinterland of the Latin colony of Aesernia (Molise region, Italy) using several non-destructive techniques, chiefly artefactual survey, geophysics, and interpretation of aerial photographs. Nevertheless large areas of the territory are covered by the dense forests of the Matese mountains, a ridge belonging the Apennine chain, or covered by bushes due to the abandonment of the countryside. The project won’t be complete without integrating the marginal, remote and forested areas into our study of the Roman hinterland. Besides, it’s also relevant to discuss the feasibility of LiDAR data sets in the study of Mediterranean landscapes and its role within contemporary Landscape Archaeology.
Goal:
+ to study in detail forested areas in the colonial hinterland of Aesernia.
+ to found the correct parameters of the classification algorithm to be able to locate possible archaeological structures or to document appropriately those we already known.
+ to document and create new visualization of hill-top fortified sites that belong to the indigenous population and are currently poorly studied due to inaccessibility and forest coverage (Monte San Paolo, Civitalla, Castelriporso, etc.)
+ to demonstrate the archaeological potential of LiDAR data in Italy and help other scholars to work with that kind of data, explaining basic information about data quality, where and how to acquire imagery and examples of application in archaeology. A paper entitled “Working with ALS – LiDAR data in Central South Italy. Tips and experiences”, will be presented in the International Mediterranean Survey Workshop by the end of February in Athens.
Data:
Recently the LERC project has acquired a large LiDAR dataset created by the Italian Geoportale Nazionale and the Minisstero dell’Ambiente e della Tutella del Territorio e del Mare. The data was produced originally to monitor land-slides and erosive risk.
+ The average point resolution is 1 meter.
+ The data sets were cropped originally in 1 sq km. tiles by the Geoportale Nazionale for distribution purposes.
LAStools processing:
1) data is provided in *.txt files thus the first step is to create appropriate LAS files to work with [txt2las]
2) combine areas of circa 16 sq km (still fewer than 20 million points to be processed in one piece with LAStools) in the surroundings of the colony of Aesernia and in the Matese mountains [lasmerge]
3) assign the correct projection to the data [lasmerge or las2las]
4) extract the care-earth with the best-fitting parameters [lasground or lasground_new]
5) create bare-earth terrain rasters as a first step to visualize and analyze the area [lasdem]