Photo Gallery Laser Archaeology
The Boyne Valley in Ireland, shown here, contains three prehistoric monuments that are part of the Brú na Bóinne UNESCO World Heritage Site.
A team with the Irish research project "Discovery Programme" scanned the already heavily researched area with lasers...
...finding a number of small mounds, possible burial sites and Stone Age earthworks. The map was practically filled with points of potential archaeological interest, shown here in red. The green dots indicate already known sites.
Here, a detailed image of the three monuments -- Knowth, Newgrange and Dowth. LIDAR scans are accurate up to just a few centimeters.
The Hill of Tara, shown here in 3-D, is one of Ireland's most famous prehistoric sites. Just like Germany's Glauberg plateau, it had already been extensively researched...
...but high-resolution LIDAR scans made it possible to see not just the central parts of the site...
...but also previously unknown structures. The enlargement of the section in the yellow box...
...brought researches to a henge (a) and a burial mound (b). The clearly visible trench through the center of the image was excavated between 1899 and 1902 by the so-alled King's Chair group, which hoped to find a mythical treasure.
One of the most famous monasteries from the Middle Ages is located on Great Skellig, an island off Ireland's southwestern coast.
Researchers with Ireland's Discovery Programme created a model of the island with a laser scanner to help with preservation work on the monastery, built between the 6th and 8th centuries, and later abandoned in the 12th century.
The Discovery Programme conducted a laser scan of the island with a quality of 60 points per square meter to create a digital surface model. This image shows the raw, unedited data...
...which was used to create several different types of images. This one is called a principle component analysis, but because it's difficult to interpret, researchers calculate other images with the data, as well.
This next image of the monastery was created using running slope analysis algorithms, which show strongly identified edges such as stairs and walls.
Here, a shaded relief from the same data.
Researchers also use other processing algorithms to create enhanced visualizations. For example, this "sky view factor" analyzes radiation across the model. This was considered the best for much of the research conducted.
The Skellig Michael monastery: LIDAR data allows...
...the creation of 3-D models. But once researchers start focusing on individual structures, they have to rely on terrestrial laser scanning for more precise models.
