Abstract
With its ability to penetrate dense tropical canopies, LiDAR is revolutionizing how ancient Mesoamerican landscapes are recorded. Locating ancient sites in the Maya area of Central America traditionally employed a variety of techniques, ranging from on-the-ground survey to aerial and satellite imagery. Because of dense vegetation covering most ancient remains, archaeological documentation of the extent of archaeological sites using traditional means was both difficult and usually incomplete. LiDAR was initially applied to the site of Caracol, Belize in April 2009 and yielded a 200 sq km Digital Elevation Model that, for the first time, provided a complete view of how the archaeological remains from a single Maya site – its monumental architecture, roads, residential settlement, and agricultural terraces – were distributed over the landscape. With the detailed information that can be extracted from this technology, LiDAR is significantly changing our perceptions of ancient Maya civilization by demonstrating both its pervasive anthropogenic landscapes and the scale of its urban settlements.
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Acknowledgements
The LiDAR research undertaken at Caracol was supported by NASA Grant #NNX08AM11G through the Space Archaeology program and a University of Central Florida – University of Florida – Space Research Initiative (UCF-UF-SRI) grant. We appreciate the support of the Belize Institute of Archaeology in carrying out this work and also the ongoing assistance from NCALM scientists Ramesh Shrestha, William Carter, and Michael Sartori. The archaeological research at Caracol has been supported by: the Ahau Foundation; the Alphawood Foundation; the Dart Foundation; the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc.; the Geraldine and Emory Ford Foundation; the Government of Belize; the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation; the National Science Foundation [grants BNS-8619996, SBR-9311773, and SBR 97–08637]; the Stans Foundation; the United States Agency for International Development; the University of Central Florida; and, private donations. The authors also wish to acknowledge the helpful comments of three reviewers.
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Chase, A.F., Chase, D.Z., Weishampel, J.F. (2013). The Use of LiDAR at the Maya Site of Caracol, Belize. In: Mapping Archaeological Landscapes from Space. SpringerBriefs in Archaeology(), vol 5. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6074-9_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6074-9_15
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