Lidar Workshop in Athens, 15 March 2024 – Call for papers

Lidar and Landscapes in the Archaeology of Greece
15 March 2024
Cotsen Hall, American School of Classical Studies

Aerially acquired lidar data has had a dramatic effect on the study of
archaeological landscapes. Discoveries of whole cities or previously
unknown regional systems of settlement in the Maya lowlands, the Amazon,
and the jungles of southeast Asia have made headlines and gripped the
popular imagination. Mediterranean applications have received less acclaim,
but are no less significant for understanding past landscapes.
High-resolution elevation models and the unique ability of lidar to “see”
beneath vegetation offer archaeologists the opportunity to detect subtle
variations in the landscape and features that may otherwise go unnoticed,
often over large areas. Over the last decade, several projects in Greece
have integrated lidar into their research programs in a variety of ways.
The technology and its applications are still new enough, however, that
there has been little opportunity for disciplinary dialogue on the subject.

This workshop invites archaeologists working with lidar in Greece to
discuss recent and ongoing projects, with a particular focus on research
goals and methodologies. We invite researchers to consider some of the
following themes:
• Problems and potential for lidar applications in Greece versus other
parts of the world
• Techniques for processing or visualizing point clouds and various types
of derivative rasters
• Archaeological and environmental spatial analysis
• Feature identification and classification
• Machine learning
• Ground-truthing, verification, and error detection
• Comparison with other remote sensing techniques
• Issues of scale—site, landscape, and regional applications
• Lidar as an archaeological tool versus a remote sensing research topic in
its own right
• Interdisciplinary collaboration

We hope that by sharing methods, problems, and ideas we can learn from one
another and provide some signposts for future applications of lidar and
other remote sensing techniques in Greece. The workshop will be hosted by
the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and will involve
colleagues from the Greek Archaeological Service, various foreign schools
in Greece, universities in Europe and the US, and the aerial survey and
geospatial industry. We invite interested researchers to submit an abstract
of c. 200 words by 2 January 2024; abstracts should be sent to Alex Knodell
at aknodell@carleton.edu.