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I mapped a Roman villa in 2016 with a tape measure and graph paper, last month I did one from my couch in Tucson
Back when I was volunteering on a dig near Cirencester in 2016, we laid out the whole trench grid by hand with 30 meter tapes and it ate two full days. Last month I georeferenced a villa complex in Portugal from LiDAR tiles on my laptop in Tucson and had a full plan drawn in about four hours. The part that still gets me is how much we guessed at back then that the elevation data just shows outright now. Anyone else here made the jump to remote sensing, and do you ever feel like you are missing the dirt under your nails?
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phoenix2143d ago
Watched a YouTube tutorial on LiDAR last winter thinking I would map some old field walls near me and ended up spending six hours trying to figure out why my laptop fan sounded like a jet taking off. Made me miss the days when my biggest tech problem was a tape measure that snapped back too fast and sliced my thumb. The part you mentioned about guessing versus actually seeing the elevation still blows my mind though, because we used to argue for hours about whether a lump in the ground was a wall foundation or just a tree stump. Now the hillshade just lays it all out and you wonder why you ever sweated it. I do miss the dirt and the pub lunch after, but sitting in my pajamas with coffee while the software crunches data is a pretty sweet trade.
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