Drone and airborne lidar in Greece: a Mediterranean perspective on processing techniques and cultural landscapes
Abstract
Landscape research in the Mediterranean basin has evolved constantly with new research questions and theoretical approaches from the beginning of the discipline. The impact of Annales and New Archaeology on the study of political and economic landscapes in the 1970s and 1980s has been followed by postcolonial theory and other post-processual approaches to the manifold aspects of social life in ancient societies that were previously ignored or not considered, allowing for nuanced narratives of the past. An exponential increase in technological development has accompanied this improvement in renewed approaches to Mediterranean landscapes. Initially, technology was primarily used to manage the information gathered from traditional projects in the field, i.e. GIS and computer applications, and more recently, we contemplate how the datasets produced by technological approaches became the source of archaeological inquiry and historical research. Thus, geospatial data should be positioned at the same level as field data. We could call both archaeological data regardless of their digital or analogical origin. The most obvious example is aerial photography, a source of extensive information about sites and landscapes, which has provided valuable proxies for historical interpretations of landscapes from the early 20th century. Nowadays, lidar technology has taken the lead in landscape research.
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