from the what-have-the-Romans-done-for-us dept.
Back in 43AD, after the Roman conquest of Britain, the Emperor Vespasian sent governor Quintus Petilius Cerialis to what's now Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cumbria to wrestle control of the north of England from a Celtic tribe called the Brigantes and put down a rebellion that had erupted after the breakdown of the marriage between Queen Cartimandua and her husband Venetius (she eloped with a 'common soldier'). These roads were an important part of connecting buildings and settlements to consolidate territory up north.
LiDAR mapping has helped to find four lost Roman roads so far, and there are hopes it will enable archaeologists to find many more - this 'light detection and ranging' laser mapping technology can be used to 'prove' the course a road took where before it was only suspected. LiDAR enables them to spot 'aggers' - Roman ramparts - running straight for a few kilometres, where a road must have been.
At present, about 75 per cent of England is mapped in this way, with limited knowledge of upland areas – the Environment Agency began LiDAR scanning 20 years ago as a means of tracking changing coastlines and performing flood modelling.
They have just announced plans to map the entire of England – which they say is the equivalent of about 32 million football pitches - by the end of 2020.
To create LiDAR maps, aircraft with laser scanners measure the distance between the plane and objects it encounters. Instead of radio or sound waves, as in the case of Radar or Sonar, LiDAR - wait for it - uses light waves and 'velocity of time' to calculate the time it takes to hit an object and be sent back, building up a detailed picture of what is out there.
[...] Beyond assessing flood risk, planning defences and understanding the natural landscape for varied purposes including those of archaeologists, the agency also hopes to fight "waste crime," which James Bevan, chief executive of the environment agency, has dubbed "the new narcotics".
Waste dumping reportedly costs £1 billion a year, with 1,000 sites discovered in 2015 - the process involves fraudsters dumping skip-loads of rubbish onto a piece of land and leaving it there to fester, while charging customers for the pleasure. LiDAR data enables authorities to discover sudden changes in the landscape quickly and crack down on the practice.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday March 17 2018, @08:33PM (5 children)
Isn't it great when you can get professors, history buffs and "Concerned Citizens" arguing for your technology budget!
"Roman Roads"
"Archaeology"
"History"
"Policing"
"Spying"
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday March 17 2018, @08:36PM (1 child)
Archaeology is not a new application for LIDAR:
LIDAR Reveals Huge Number of Previously Unknown Mayan Structures [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MostCynical on Saturday March 17 2018, @09:00PM
No, but if hyping a find like this helps ensure funding of their spy planes, so much the better.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @10:50PM (2 children)
Neither Wired[1] nor the gov.uk page defines what makes something a Roman road.
I picture a thing paved with closely-spaced uniform flat stones.
That must have taken a huge amount of effort.
...and why are they unknown; why weren't they used from that point onward?
...or were these "roads" simply dirt cart trails or footpaths?
[1] Horrible site that never gets better and often gets worse.
Had I been the submitter, I would have gone with the gov.uk page.
...or maybe tried to find something that actually described what the "Roman roads" in England are|were like.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by pTamok on Sunday March 18 2018, @09:18AM (1 child)
Neither Wired[1] nor the gov.uk page defines what makes something a Roman road.
I picture a thing paved with closely-spaced uniform flat stones.
That must have taken a huge amount of effort.
...and why are they unknown; why weren't they used from that point onward?
...or were these "roads" simply dirt cart trails or footpaths?
Roman roads were carefully constructed (there were several types - see the Wikipedia article on Roman road construction [wikipedia.org]), but once the Romans left Britain there was no organised maintenance, and the roads acted as a convenient source of dressed stones for other building purposes: why go to the trouble of quarrying your own building materials when someone else has done the job for you and left the stuff just lying around in the countryside? This meant that in the 1500 years or so since the Romans left Britain, most of the roads degenerated into muddy tracks in winter and dusty tracks in summer. Road maintenance is expensive, and one of the purposes of building them was to enable fast movement of military resources. Once the Roman administration left, there was less incentive for their upkeep, and no territory-wide authority to enforce their upkeep.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @10:51PM
Yeah. That makes sense.
[The Romans exited] and left the stuff just lying around
Right. Opportunism.
The Wikipedia page also mentions lesser Roman roads of tramped-down dirt or gravel-covered natures.
This image [wikimedia.org] indicates that even after the paving stones of the Appian Way-type roads have been stripped of their paving stones, there are more layers that could remain obvious to ground-penetration surveys.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday March 17 2018, @09:05PM (4 children)
"32 million football pitches"
I think that should be (for the benefit of American readers): 32 million soccer pitches.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Entropy on Saturday March 17 2018, @09:24PM
Or for the benefit of anyone on this site..not a sports analogy.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @10:37PM (2 children)
Yeah. I had to look that one up (before coming to the comments page).
The thing is, unlike USAian hand-egg playing fields, which are always 100 yards from goal line to goal line and 60 yards from sideline to sideline, a soccer playing field can range from 100 yards to 130 yards long and 50 yards to 100 yards wide.
So, not an especially useful metric.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by requerdanos on Saturday March 17 2018, @10:51PM
What's more, they are uniformly level, completely clear of terrain features that would impede passage or exploration, and well-marked. Thus, they are quite unlike England itself and so not only not a useful metric, but not a particularly applicable one. They aren't equivalent at all, irrespective of area.
I know it seems obvious, but perhaps something like "acres" or "hectares" or even "[any convenient linear unit]2" might better convey the size of an area.
(Score: 2) by dak664 on Sunday March 18 2018, @05:09PM
Less confusing would have been to give both UK and US units:
32 million football pitches [14.8 - 38.4 fields]
(Score: 5, Funny) by SparkyGSX on Saturday March 17 2018, @09:39PM (1 child)
Let us contemplate exactly what is the "velocity of time". One might be tempted to say "about one second per second".
If you do what you did, you'll get what you got
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 18 2018, @09:51AM
Time speeds up when you use the Internet. You just start doing it, and the next time you look, a few hours have passed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.