Abstract
LiDAR—like photography and other visual technologies—not only produces pictures but extends our power to detect, record, and imagine landscapes. It allows very precise three-dimensional mapping of the surface of the earth, generating as it does high-resolution topographic data even where surface is obscured by forest and vegetation. Interpretation of LiDAR data poses much more than just technical challenges. What makes LiDAR different from other topographic techniques is absence of selectiveness: data are typically gathered across complete landscape blocks recording landscape in an indiscriminate way. This allows us to address complex sites as integral parts of landscapes and as landscapes in themselves. In this way we can analyze complex sites as palimpsests, created through processes and practices that accumulated and inscribed new traces or erased old ones. Study of complex sites is thus part of the study of landscapes, landscape archaeology.
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Mlekuž, D. (2013). Skin Deep: LiDAR and Good Practice of Landscape Archaeology. In: Corsi, C., Slapšak, B., Vermeulen, F. (eds) Good Practice in Archaeological Diagnostics. Natural Science in Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01784-6_6
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