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Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#11

Post by smackay »

arethuza wrote: post #9
smcl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And of course up in the north, the Moray Firth :-) I wonder if there's anything referred to as "Firth" in a non-Scotland place, perhaps up in Canada or in NZ? update: yes (in England, Germany, NZ and Antarctica)! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firth#English_firths

And a bit further north there is the Pentland Firth which, of course, is nowhere near the Pentlands!

From wikipedia:

The name is presumed to be a corruption of the Old Norse "Petlandsfjörð",[1] meaning "the fjord of Pictland", and is completely unrelated to the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentland_Firth

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#13

Post by kjaftaedi »

degenerate wrote: post #12
joosters wrote: post #2

Some kind of scale on those scan images would be helpful...

Or how it works at all. Is it like a shallow ground-penetrating radar? If not, how does it find these sites? The article left more questions than it gave answers.

It's just LiDAR.

They manipulate the data on a computer to explore the landscape (digitally removing tree canopies and things like that)

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#15

Post by EvilGrin »

degenerate wrote: post #12
joosters wrote: post #2

Some kind of scale on those scan images would be helpful...

Or how it works at all. Is it like a shallow ground-penetrating radar? If not, how does it find these sites? The article left more questions than it gave answers.

It's LIDAR. It's main benefit for finding archaeology earthworks is that it is possible to remove the vegetation from the results. So anything obscured by trees becomes visible for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar#Airborne

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#16

Post by debbiedowner »

What is really interesting is that the main innovation is never mentioned in the BBC article. The academic they quote, Dave Cowley, is an author on "Using deep neural networks on airborne laser scanning data: Results from a case study of semi‐automatic mapping of archaeological topography on Arran, Scotland" from 11/2018 [0]. The "new 3D technology" that is becoming more "widely available" and allows for "rapid discovery" is not LIDAR (which is very old) but Deep Learning as applied to LIDAR. It's interesting b/c the BBC doesn't mention "Deep Learning" in the article. LIDAR is old enough that it was launched into space as early as 1971. Deep learning is most popular on images, but is becoming more popular recently on less structured data like the unordered collection of points in xD (x >= 3), so this is the new part.

(I will also say that in this case, the article makes images out of the LIDAR data and runs DL on that, but this is not mandatory. Checkout Pointet++ if interested. I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that the "cutting edge" part was not collecting data but analyzing it.)

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/arp.1731

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#17

Post by vanderZwan »

kjaftaedi wrote: post #13
degenerate wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or how it works at all. Is it like a shallow ground-penetrating radar? If not, how does it find these sites? The article left more questions than it gave answers.

It's just LiDAR. They manipulate the data on a computer to explore the landscape (digitally removing tree canopies and things like that)

While you're technically correct, I think calling it "just" LiDAR is kind of underselling how amazing that technology really is!

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#18

Post by debbiedowner »

debbiedowner wrote: post #16

What is really interesting is that the main innovation is never mentioned in the BBC article. The academic they quote, Dave Cowley, is an author on "Using deep neural networks on airborne laser scanning data: Results from a case study of semi‐automatic mapping of archaeological topography on Arran, Scotland" from 11/2018 [0]. The "new 3D technology" that is becoming more "widely available" and allows for "rapid disco…

p.s. I think the LIDAR data is here: https://remotesensingdata.gov.scot/collections , not on Canmore. It seems to be about a gigabyte total.

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#19

Post by gabiruh »

dooglius wrote: post #10
gabiruh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. That’s pure Dog-whistle politics.

Can anyone explain...?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

By saying that they can scan buried ancient sites it resonates to the "enemy" that they can see everything it is trying to hide.

What, at a first glance, may sound like celebrating science is just warfare.

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#20

Post by EvilGrin »

radicalbyte wrote: post #14

These LIDAR maps are really cool. There are some really interesting maps of the Amazon too: https://www.businessinsider.nl/archaeologists-found-previous...

Yep, one interesting idea about these Amazon sites is that they add corroborating evidence to Francisco de Orellana (the first Spanish explorer to travel the length of the Amazon) that he claimed he had found huge cites with hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of people living in the Amazon basin.

Presumably by the time later explorers came along 50 years later to verify his claims, the people had all been killed by European diseases like small pox and the jungle had claimed back the cities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Orellana

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