This is somewhat tautological - of course archaeologists make discoveries on the sites they are digging on. It's very hard to make discoveries at sites that you aren't allowed on!
Not as hard as it used to be: https://houseprices.io/lidar/SU1025069970
https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SU11914213
Glastonbury Tor 3D:
https://houseprices.io/lidar/ST5125038630/3d
Maiden Castle:
https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SU567924
in the news for discovery of Iron Age settlement:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/feb/14/astonishing-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glastonbury_Tor#Terraces
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avebury#Location_and_environme...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittenham_Clumps#Location
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maiden_Castle,_Dorset#First_hi...
I think the inclusion for Glastonbury Tor is particularly useful, because the LIDAR perfectly shows the terraces that were already discussed in that section of the article.
In the past, I have scanned many hand-drawn (engraving) pictures in Victorian tomes of County Histories in my local library, to get topographies of hillfort sites for Wikipedia (mainly in the SW of England). I will now start to add these LIDAR images. Better to scan the ground itself than to scan a print of an engraving of a hand-drawn picture by some tweed-jacketed Victorian archaeology dude.
If hanoz has any issues with the copyright attributions and CC BY 4.0 license on wikicommons, I would be glad to correct any mistakes, or add more praise for the glorious hanoz :)
That is a fucking amazing resource, thank you!
I've already found two places of interest to check out next time I go North to my old stomping grounds in the countryside.
Sometimes the future isn't such a terrible place.
Yes, I did try it, as too the three other people I've since shared it with.
I like the point map version too - I've a grab of a 'minecarft-looking version' of my home village - wonderful!
By which he means, "When will it be populated with more data?"
I presume he's asking as his particular place of interest won't let him view 3d or pointmap views.
Thanks! x
- ed - reading this back, this sounds rude - sorry, just caught up in the excitement.
Natural Resources Wales is aiming for similar by Winter 2022 apparently.
The raw data comes from the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales as .asc files, which are just a big 2d array of height values in text file, in this case covering 1km2 each.
I downloaded all these and wrote a script to produce .png tiles using a "hill shading" algorithm, i.e. make pixel darker if pixel to top left is taller, using C#.
Once I was getting nice results I rented a hefty server at AWS to run it on the whole dataset for 24 hours, generating 2 million .png files, then used leafletjs to display them slippy map style.
I was originally hosting the tiles on AWS but the egress fees were too much so I move them all to a 3€/month bare metal arm server at Scaleway.
The 3D stuff re-fetches the raw .asc files from the source agencies on demand using a AWS Lambda script which cuts out the 1km2 of interest and passes it back to the web server, which renders it using three.js for the surface texture mode, or potree for the pointcloud version.
The website itself is built in asp.net core, running on a $10/month box at Digital Ocean.
In theory, you could combine terrain and surface models[0] to detect and colour features… but that's tricky.
[0]: https://lle.gov.wales/catalogue/item/LidarCompositeDataset/
There's an EU directive supposed to solve this, but it's a slow, slow process.
Is there a thing like this for the US?
The lidar map is kind of a side project within a side project. It's the first and so far only experiment within the 'Lab' section of the parent site (https://houseprices.io/lab) where I had intended to try all manner of stuff with mapping and open data etc.
It didn't exactly grow to be another Google Labs in the end. It did last longer though.
I assume it's some IT guys thing.