LIDAR AND NEW DISCOVERIES OF HILLFORTS IN LATVIA

Abstract

In the last four years, an explosion-like process of discovering new hillforts has been observed. This has been made possible due to the public availability of LIDAR relief maps and point-cloud data collected in the scanning process. This paper aims to describe the practical process of working with LIDAR data in discovering, describing and registering new hillforts, as well as look for answers to the question of why have so many hillforts (77 in the time from 2018 until 2021) only been discovered now and using remote sensing data. The paper gives an insight into the process of collaboration between professional archaeologists and history enthusiasts that spend countless hours going through LIDAR maps looking for relief transformations characteristic of hillforts. The result of this collaboration is an impressive number on new hillfort sites that change our views on settlement patterns and social processes in Latvian prehistory, especially in the Latgale region. This region has by far the highest number of new hillfort sites and it seems that the reasons for only discovering these hillforts with remote sensing data is related to the ethnic history of the region and the loss of hillfort folklore because of demographic and migration processes.