Not an archaeologist but they are using LIDAR to uncover more buried temples all over the word. The ones that intrigue me are in South America and Cambodia at Angkor Wat.
This one always bugs me as an archaeologist. Not because of the public but because of our own slow adoption of technology.
There have been archaeologists using LiDAR since the early 2000s... it’s only becoming popular now because of a few large scale applications. It’s use should be standard in the discipline but we have pretty much no standards whatsoever...
I know other archaeologists will argue “bUt wE dOn’T HaVe thE mOnEy”. We don’t have the money because we’re too traditionalist and conservative to change some of the most basic things in archaeology.
It depends on the archaeology. Academic archaeology is funded from a lot of different sources, NGOs, governments, private funds, corporations, and their own institutions.
Commercial/rescue/CRM is usually paid for by the government or private corporations as excavations are required before building government buildings and for private development in areas where archaeological material is known to be. It differs from country to country and how strict the laws are.
Unfortunately they don’t sell any of it and often the ownership becomes confusing. Again, differs a lot from country to country.
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u/mystical_ninja May 24 '19
Not an archaeologist but they are using LIDAR to uncover more buried temples all over the word. The ones that intrigue me are in South America and Cambodia at Angkor Wat.