Lidar pilot survey
Because the 'Open Forest' has largely been spared from development and agriculture for the last thousand years and more, it still contains many traces of past activities which remain visible as ‘lumps and bumps’, ranging from prehistoric burial mounds to post medieval bee gardens.
Interpreting these can tell us a lot about how the landscape has been used and exploited over the past four thousand years. But finding and recording these features can be difficult and time-consuming for archaeologists – using traditional field survey it is estimated that it might be more than one hundred years before we have an understanding of the number and range of sites.
Airborne Lidar makes it possible to speed up the process. It uses a pulsed laser beam that is scanned from side to side as the aircraft flies over the survey area, measuring up to 100,000 points per second to produce using a very accurate digital model of the landscape which we can examine using specialist software in order to pick out these features and show how they relate to each other and fit into the landscape as a whole.
The New Forest Lidar pilot survey area
The New Forest Lidar Pilot Survey, undertaken in partnership with the Forestry Commission, is a 34km² high resolution lidar transect on the open forest between Godshill and Burley, straddling the A31, flown in spring 2009.
The project’s aim was to see how effective lidar would be in the New Forest for identifying archaeological sites, and to look at other ways of using the data that could benefit the National Park.
The survey has identified over four hundred archaeological sites, the majority of which had not previously been recorded within the Hampshire County Council Historic Environment Record. The sites cover over four millennia of New Forest history from Bronze Age barrows to Romano-British field systems and Second World War installations.
