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M. Doneus, C. Briese, T. Podobnikar:
"Documentation and analysis of archaeological structures in forested areas using airborne laser scanning";
Talk: 12. Internationale Tagung "Kulturelles Erbe und Neue Technologien", Wien, Österreich; 2007-11-05 - 2007-11-07.

Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS, also referred to as LIDAR) is an active remote sensing technique that allows a very detailed sampling of the landscape. Nowadays, this technique is used for a lot of different applications (e.g. digital terrain modelling, city modelling, vegetation and corridor mapping, etc.). Also in the field of archaeology an increasing number of ALS applications can be found nowadays, but successful investigations in forested areas are still rare.
This paper presents a short summary of the main ALS principles including the advanced possibilities of using full-waveform ALS data for the archaeological prospection in forested areas. Besides the promising results of a full-waveform ALS campaign in the Leithagebirge, the paper will focus on the experiences gained within this project and will discuss the limitations of this technique. Additionally, the issue of point density will be discussed. For that aim data pyramids of the ALS data will be produced by data reduction and the resulting digital terrain models will be analysed. Furthermore, the results of the ALS case study area in the Leithagebirge are compared with an independent historical field survey of the archaeological structures (barrows, dams, etc.). On the basis of the comparison of the results of both surveying techniques the respective advantages and disadvantages (different quality aspects) are analysed. Finally, an outlook section summarises the paper and presents ideas for further research work.

archaeological prospection, full-waveform, airborne laser scanning, LIDAR