Day 12:

Today I got to see a surveying tool called ground based LiDAR. It shoots microwaves and calculates the return signals to create a 3D image and it does a complete 360 from where it is positioned. So for the first two setups that we were there for we hid behind trees and rock walls so we didn’t get into the line of sight of the machine. For the third setup we got to stand by the machine and watch it take measurements and it was quite a exercise. There we about 8 of us running around trying our best to not get into the sight of the business end of the machine. That meant we had to run around the machine as it rotated. Out of context it would be a pretty silly sight to see us doing this “ritual”. I’m excited to see what the data will produce!

Then for the rest of the day we pretty much processed data and I got to talk to Paul (one of the TA’s) about the limitations of PhotoScan. It’ll help down the line as I go forth with my project ideas. It might be cool to collect images of the cliff faces to map the areas where there were burial caves and use photoscan to recreate the areas. However, I don’t know what the significance of it would be in an archaeology sense. I’ll ask Dr. Lipo or Dr. Hunt about it to get a better sense of what kind of question I could form.

On Saturday our UAV common product is due but we do not have much at the moment as few UAVs have gotten off the ground so there is not much imagery to work with. So at the moment we’re using the imagery we do have and trying to get PhotoScan to produce something usable.