Lidar-Derived Road Profiles A Case Study Using Chaco Roads from the US Southwest

Despite considerable developments in the archaeological application of lidar for detecting roads, less attention has been given to studying road morphology using lidar. As a result, archaeologists are well equipped to locate but not thoroughly study roads via lidar data. Here, a method that visualizes and statistically compares road profiles using elevation values extracted from lidar-derived digital elevation models is presented and illustrated through a case study on Chaco roads, located in the US Southwest. This method is used to establish the common form of ground-truthed Chaco roads and to measure how frequently this form is across non-ground-truthed roads. This method is an addition to the growing suite of tools for documenting and comparing roads using remotely sensed data, and it can be particularly useful in threatened landscapes where ground truthing is becoming less possible.