Spatial analysis and Lidar data for the extraction of archaeological features: The Etruscan site of San Giovenale, Blera (Lazio)

Over the past two decades, the use of LiDAR has found increasing popularity in archaeology due to its capability to "penetrate" the vegetation cover, thus providing information in areas were other technologies are ineffective and in places where field surveys are particularly difficult, such as areas with dense vegetation. Nevertheless, despite the recognized effectiveness of LiDAR, its capability for archaeological prospection could be strongly limited by very dense vegetation cover, and, in these cases, the data processing and analysis requires special attention. In this paper, to improve the identification of hidden archaeological features for the territory around the Etruscan site of San Giovenale, Blera (Lazio), spatial analysis was adopted to analyze the LiDAR -derived DEM.