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Interactive Analysis of Lidar Data: Reanimating a Chinese Camp on the Victorian Goldfields

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Abstract

The distinctive character of the Chinese camp on the goldfields is one of the missing elements in the history of the gold era of Victoria in the second half of the nineteenth century. This article uses imagery derived from a high-precision LiDAR survey to recover evidence of the structures and the community of a remote Chinese camp. It describes an interactive approach to generating, visualising, and analyzing LiDAR derived terrain models designed to cater for misclassification of LiDAR ground points and variable relationships between natural topographic variation and variations attributable to unrecorded cultural features. The results of spatial analysis and visualisations shed light on the physical character of the camp, the character of the community inhabiting it, and its eventual fate.

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Data Availability

The surfaces and indices of variation presented in this paper are based on a section of a LiDAR las format data set covering a broader area. Enquiries for access to this data should be made to the custodian of this data referred to in this paper. More information is available from the corresponding author on request.

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  1. Department of Archaeology and History, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Richard John MacNeill

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MacNeill, R.J. Interactive Analysis of Lidar Data: Reanimating a Chinese Camp on the Victorian Goldfields. Int J Histor Archaeol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-023-00720-8

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