Day 14: Decision time!

Well, not quite…

Day started with meeting the locals at church.

Finishing up Powerpoint, reading research articles, and getting ideas for my individual project followed my outing.

Presentation went really well.  I believe the geology may have been the foundation for a lot of things to consider like hydrology, vegetation, and in a roundabout way the archaeological sites.  So it was probably right that we went first even though we did not intend to.  All projects were able to feed off of each others information, and may have helped some people to refine their question or even go into a new direction.

Following the presentations we had a pizza break, fed the goats and horses, then reconvened to discuss our projects.  However possibly due to the great questions and presentations we were very late into the afternoon and the projects will now be presented as a one page proposal.

Unfortunately, my questions have to be rethought due to only 1/3rd of the Lidar data being available, and the scale of the DEM/Lidar is too big to tell small scale site features.  The other things that complicate my question is the lack of certainty of piles of rocks having significance.  Should the above data be available and at a scale that allows ~1m pixel resolution, I may be able to suss out the natural from man-made features.  And finally if the sites would be historic vs. prehistoric since this may have had a difference in location of sites.

If this is too complicated, I have the fallback question of doing the valley walls with go-pro imaging, doing transects with the quad-copter or the other copter that Ted uses, and Thermal imaging.  It would be interesting to see if these technologies could compliment each other and show the location of caves with the idea that some would be used as burials.