Archaeologists have discovered a 5,000 year old fortress hidden beneath dense forests in Neamț County, Romania, shedding new light on a pivotal period in human history – the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. The project was the brainchild of Vlad Dulgheriu, owner of Geocad Services and a former student of archaeologist Vasile Diaconu, who proposed using lidar technology to explore the site. As enthusiast of lidar archaeology are well aware, there is no better tool for uncovering the signatures of archaeological remains than lidar.
Geocad Services drones mounted with lidar to penetrated dense vegetation and generate a point cloud of the site, revealing a fortress that had remained unseen for millennia. Strategically built on elevated terrain, the fortress provided its ancient inhabitants with clear visibility of the surrounding landscape, an essential advantage for detecting potential threats. Defensive features such as large ditches and earthen mounds, some stretching hundreds of meters, suggest that the settlement was carefully fortified. The scale and complexity of these structures highlight the ingenuity of early builders, reflecting their advanced planning and engineering skills during a time of significant cultural and technological change.
Without lidar, the site’s intricate topography, buried fortification walls, and previously undetected passageways would have remained concealed beneath centuries of vegetative growth. Lidar allowed for subtle topographic variations to be detected reveal previous unknown details about the site, providing a high-resolution digital model of the site, and digitally preserving the site for future study.
Visit our Lidar Archaeology category for more examples of lidar being used for archaeological purposes, like Chacoan Roads and a Leonardo da Vinci Castle.
Photo credit: Image: “Drone with Lidar” by Jonte, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
For more details, read the full article (it is in Romanian).
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