The ArchaeoTech Podcast · The Archaeology Podcast Network

Using Lidar to Analyze Chacoan Road Profiles - Ep 208

·36 min·2 clips

Sean Field smooths each profile into an idealized road shape and compares it to ground-truth roads.

The hosts begin with Paul back in the States for only a short window before he flies back to Saudi Arabia. He talks about how hard it is to manage fieldwork remotely when the job is too much for one person. Chris and Paul settle into the main topic quickly. They discuss a lidar study that is not trying to discover roads from scratch. Instead, the article works from known ground truth segments and tries to characterize them. The method generates road profiles every half meter. That produces about 84,000 transect profiles, which the hosts treat as a serious amount of data. The code is posted on GitHub, which they appreciate. Much of the conversation turns on what to do with the profiles once they exist. Paul and Chris focus on how the data are massaged before comparison. The show spends time on R, because the analysis lives there. Chris says he is not a fan of R. He compares it to left-handed scissors, which work fine for people who are built for them and feel wrong for everyone else. He still acknowledges that people who are comfortable with R can do excellent work in it. Paul says he has never used R much either. That keeps the exchange practical rather than tribal. The hosts also separate the tool discussion from the article's actual goal. They make clear that the value is in characterization, not simply in labeling something as a road. The episode ends up as a grounded talk about methods, limits, and the way archaeological analysis turns into workflow. It is the sort of conversation that cares about what the software helps you understand and what it makes harder.

As heard by us

A grounded look at LIDAR, road profiles, and the practical side of archaeological analysis.

Chris Webster and Paul Zimmerman make the case that a LIDAR study of prehistoric road profiles can be read as a practical lesson in how archaeological evidence becomes argument.

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Why you'd press play

Want a plainspoken look at lidar without the hype?

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