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M. Doneus, C. Briese:
"Airborne Laser Scanning in forested areas - potential and limitations of an archaeological prospection technique";
in: "EAC Occasional Paper No. 5 Remote Sensing for Archaeological Heritage Management", Europae Archaeologia Consilium (EAC), 2011, ISBN: 978-963-9911-20-8, 59 - 76.

Archaeological applications using Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) are
increasing in number. Since the production of ALS-derived digital terrain models
(DTM) involves a considerable amount of money, most applications use general
purpose ALS data, which are usually cheaper and sometimes even provided for free
for scientific applications. The main problem that comes with this kind of data is
the frequent lack of meta-information. The archaeologist often does not get the
information about original point density, time of flight, instrument used, type of
flying platform, filter and DTM generation procedure. Therefore, ALS becomes a
kind of `black box´, where the derived DTM is used without further knowledge about
underlying technology, algorithms, and metadata. Consequently, there is a certain
risk that the data used will not be suitable for the archaeological application.
Based on the experience of a two-year project `LiDAR-Supported Archaeological
Prospection in Woodland´, the paper provides a review of archaeological ALS,
explains its the basic process, demonstrates its potential for landscape archaeology
especially in densely forested areas, and draws attention to some critical parameters
of ALS, which should be known to the user. Finally, further issues, which need to be
solved in the near future, are discussed.