Identifying Ancient Settlement Patterns through LiDAR in the Mosquitia Region of Honduras

Abstract

The Mosquitia ecosystem of Honduras occupies the fulcrum between the American continents and as such constitutes a critical region for understanding past patterns of socio-political development and interaction. Heavy vegetation, rugged topography, and remoteness have limited scientific investigation. This paper presents prehistoric patterns of settlement and landuse for a critical valley within the Mosquitia derived from airborne LiDAR scanning and field investigation. We show that (i) though today the valley is a wilderness it was densely inhabited in the past; (ii) that this population was organized into a three-tiered system composed of 19 settlements dominated by a city; and, (iii) that this occupation was embedded within a human engineered landscape. We also add to a growing body of literature that demonstrates the utility of LiDAR as means for rapid cultural assessments in undocumented regions for analysis and conservation. Our ultimate hope is for our work to promote protections to safeguard the unique and critically endangered Mosquitia ecosystem and other similar areas in need of preservation.

The deep human prehistory of global tropical forests and its relevance for modern conservation

“…Evocative images of the rise, fall and sudden 'collapse' of societies in these environments also owe much to 20 th century archaeological suggestions that large, permanent settlements could not be maintained due to the low fertility of tropical soils 85 . Nevertheless, over the last two decades, archaeological data, including canopy-penetrating LiDAR mapping, have revealed previously unimagined scales of human settlement in the Americas and Southeast Asia 7,86 . Indeed, extensive settlement networks in the tropical forests of Amazonia, Southeast Asia, and Mesoamerica clearly persisted many times longer than more recent industrial and urban settlements of the modern world have been present in these environments 18,87 .…”

Geomorphological Insights on Human-Volcano Interactions and Use of Volcanic Materials in Pre-Hispanic Cultures of Costa Rica through the Holocene

“…(c) Located in the remote, impenetrable, and incompletely mapped rainforest of the Mosquitia region in Honduras, the lost city "Ciudad Blanca" was a myth before it was accurately located using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images in 1998 (Yakam-Simen et al, 1998) and rediscovered using airborne LiDAR scanning in 2009. Thanks to the detailed study of LiDAR images (Fisher et al, 2016), it was determined that this civilization profusely shaped the landscape through engineering before disappearing sometime after the arrival of Spaniards in the sixteenth century (Yakam-Simen et al, 1998). LiDAR technology was also used successfully in Costa Rica for archeological purposes around Arenal Volcano (Sheets and Sever, 1988;Sheets et al, 1991) and to map and model the Costa Rican rock spheres (Ruiz et al, 2014).…”

Effective Detection of Sub-Surface Archeological Features From Laser Scanning Point Clouds and Imagery Data

“…Firstly, based on the analysis and interpretation of the collected data, it is possible to reconnaissance of previously unknown archaeological sites, mainly these with the preserved landscape form. LIDAR applications for assessing settlements are presented among others in publications (Fisher et al, 2016), (Prufer et al, 2015), (Ebert et al, 2017) (FOTOLOT). Laser scanning capabilities are shown in forest areas (Koening and Hoefle, 2016) and (Wallace et al, 2012).…”