Friday, 07 June 2013 10:47 | Written by Axel Posluschny | | |
The EU has accepted 7 new Associated Partners to widen ArcLand's network!
- Balla Secondary School (Co. Mayo, Ireland) has carried out a very interesting project together with Kevin Barton (Landscape & Geophysical Services) for 15-16 year old students which might even have a wider impact on second level teaching in Ireland. We hope to further support projects that get us (i.e. Archaeologists in general and ArcLand in particular) in touch with enthusiastic non-archaeologists like the group from Balla.
- The West Lothian Archaeological Trust (WLAT) in Scotland is heavily involved in Kite Photography for archaeology and we can learn a lot from John Wells' and his group.
- Dublin City Council has hosted the ArcLand conference "From Known Knowns to Unknown Unknowns" and is still hosting our exhibition "Traces of the Past". Their valuable support has provided ArcLand an improved communication with the wider public.
- The Department of Applied and Environmental Geophysics, Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Comenius University (Bratislava/Slovak Republic) will be involved in our networking activities and the exchange of expertise. They are focussing on the application of near surface geophysical methods in archaeological prospecting - namely potential fields methods and GPR.
- The Department of Classical Studies and Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University (Durham/USA) will be our hub across the ocean to broaden our network and to get in touch with things that are going on in the USA.
- The Institute for Archaeological Sciences of the Bern University/CH is (finally) our connection point in Switzerland and is engaged in developing new means for the transfer of knowledge for a broader public as well as in the empowerment of new generations of junior scientist. In addition to the classic techniques of archaeological excavations and surface surveys the institute applies extensive geophysical prospection work in combination with the interpretation of both optical and radar spaceborne remote sensing data.
- The EU funded project ARIADNE is dealing with topics of data infrastructure and will be our collaboration partner for these kind of questions.
More information will be available hopefully soon on the ArcLand website's partner section.
We are looking forward to a fruitful and intense collaboration with our new partners and are looking forward to meeting them on our workshops, field schools, conferences, sessions, plenary and WP meetings or alongside any other events!
Friday, 07 June 2013 10:33 | Written by Axel Posluschny | | |
ArcLand has been approved by the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) as a new Working Party of the organisation (http://www.e-a-a.org/working_groups.htm).
We hope this helps to widen our network and to get in touch with even more archaeologists from all over Europe!
Tuesday, 14 May 2013 13:35 | Written by Ralf Hesse | | |
The Lidar Visualisation Toolbox LiVT written by Ralf Hesse at the State Office for Cultural Heritage Baden-Württemberg has now been published as an open source software project under the GNU General Public License (GPL). LiVT is a software for the computation of a variety of visualisations from high-resolution DEM data. Starting with the current version LiVT 1.0.0.20, Windows binaries, source code and documentation are now available for download at https://sourceforge.net/projects/livt/. The main change from version 1.0.0.19 to 1.0.0.20 is the addition of MultiScaleIntegral Invariants (MSII).
Tuesday, 19 February 2013 10:01 | Written by Ralf Hesse | | |
A software toolbox for LiDAR data handling and analyses (LiVT 1.0.0.19) has been developed within the framework of ArcLand by the project partners from the State Office for Cultural Heritage Management Baden-Wuerttemberg, Esslingen/DE (Ralf Hesse). The tool can be downloaded here (284.26 kB)for free, a presentation, introducing this software at the CAA Germany meeting in February 2013 is available here (44.09 MB) (at the moment only in German). For further questions please get in touch with
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.
The intention behind this Lidar Visualisation Toolbox is to provide an easy-to-use, stand-alone application to create visualisations from high-resolution airborne LIDAR-based digital elevation data. LiVT also includes tools like raster file creation from xyz point clouds. A few mouse clicks and some processing time should be enough to go from an xyz ASCII file to a grey-scale SVF image, an LRM map or a percentage map of cumulative visibility. As LiVT does not include a data viewer, additional software will be necessary to display the processing results. All algorithms in the data processing tabs output floating point raster maps. These can have quite narrow data ranges (e.g. SVF) and may require contrast stretch for display.
Installation
The software has been tested to run on 32-bit and 64-bit PCs with Microsoft Windows XP, Vista and 7. It requires the Microsoft .NET Framework version 4, so make sure to install this before installing LiVT. To install, unpack the zip file, double-click setup.exe and follow the instructions.
Getting started
Presently, file type support in LiVT is very limited. This means that files will probably have to be converted before they can be processed. LiVT reads and writes generic “raw” (binary) files with separate ascii headers. Binary files have to contain 32 bit (4 byte) floating point elevation data, and suffixes should be *.bil, *.bip. *.bsq, *.flt, *.dat or *.raw. The header file must have the same name as the binary data file and must have the suffix *.hdr. A typical header file will look like this:
BYTEORDER I
LAYOUT BIL
NROWS 1001
NCOLS 1001
NBANDS 1
NBITS 32
BANDROWBYTES 4004
TOTALROWBYTES 4004
BANDGAPBYTES 0
NODATA -9999
ULXMAP 3536300.000
ULYMAP 5375000.000
XDIM 1.000
YDIM 1.000
The user interface consists of a menu bar, an input file section and a tab menu section which offers different visualisation algorithms. The menu contains tools to rasterize xyz point clouds; in future there will be further tools for ASCII and raster data manipulation and analysis.
Monday, 05 November 2012 09:35 | Written by Axel Posluschny | | |
The aims and objectives of ArcLand have been subject in the 2nd issue of the DAI publication "DAI weltweit" ("DAI worldwide") which is available (in German) from the webpage of the German Archaeological Institute.
Friday, 23 December 2011 10:17 | Written by Axel Posluschny | | |
ArchaeoLandscapes Europe would like to introduce 5 new associated partners to our growing network, which will support our work and future activities
- VU (Free University) Amsterdam, Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, Institute of Geo- and Bioarchaeology, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (http://www.falw.vu.nl/en/research/geo-and-bioarchaeology/index.asp):
The Institute provides in three Master variants, namely Archaeometry, Landscape Archaeology and is preparing a variant "Prospective Archaeology". Courses provide training in GIS, close range, airborne and satellite remote sensing, geophysics. The institute is also working on an e-learning curriculum that provides courses on the different Master variants main topics, but also Mineralogy/petrology/geochemistry, Geology and a month field- and/or lab practicals. It has a long standing experience on in-situ documentation, preservation consultancy and monitoring. For that reason they would primarily contribute to WP4, but are interested in all of the other WP's as well.
The Moesgaard Museum is located at the same spot as the Department of Prehistoric and Middle Age Archaeology of the University of Aarhus. Aerial photographs and LiDAR are used on a daily basis, and the museum holds a substantial collection of aerial photographs. Within the last 5 years the museum has conducted aerial surveys around Jutland. Landscape studies are a key focus area, especially Neolithic and early Iron Age landscapes. Currently two Neolithic studies are ongoing and a study of Iron Age field systems in old woodlands based on the LiDAR is soon to begin. The museum also conducts geophysical prospection in Denmark and abroad, i.e. on Crimea, and has a department doing pollen analysis, macro fossils analysis, archaeozoology and conservation of artefacts. It will therefor be the ideal partner to connect research and teaching activities in a great variety of prospection and remote sensing techniques and will mainly contribute to WPs 4, 6, and 7.
The community-based Heritage Centre, which extensively uses remote sensing data in the form of aerial photographs, LiDAR and terrestrial geophysics, in interpreting and presenting a rich archaeological landscape to the public, is the perfect partner to connect archaeological professionals with the interested public and the community sector which is currently slightly under-represented in ArcLand. Its contribution will focus on WPs 2 and 4.
The Centre, as a very enthusiastic independent research trust, is involved in landscape archaeological research and its presentation both to professionals and the wider public since more than 20 years. It is specialized in the use of integrated methods or surveying and will be able to share its expertise in various fields of archaeological prospection so it will mainly be involved in WPs 2 and 7. LRC is keen both to share its experience and learn from others, through networking meetings, knowledge transfer seminars and information dissemination whether through public lectures, on the internet or on paper.
- Polytechnic Institute of Tomar University (IPT), Tomar, Portugal (http://www.ipt.pt):
The IPT is one of Portugal's leading institutions for archaeological surveying methods and will close the existing gap of institutions in that part of the Iberian Peninsula. IPT will function as a hub to disseminate ArcLand and its activities in Portugal to invite students and scholars to various activities like the planned field school in Merida in June 2012. It will also contribute to the activities of the WPs 7 and 8.
We are happy to welcome our new partners and are looking forward to a fruitful cooperation.
News & Events 
Friday, 07 June 2013 10:47 | 
Written by Axel Posluschny | 
here (
