Between Land and Sea: A LiDAR field survey to detect Bronze Age sites in the Chekka region/Lebanon

Kurzfassung/Abstract

The project “Between Land and Sea” was initiated by OREA (Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology) and is an interdisciplinary approach to combine the geology, geomorphology and paleo-environment of the Chekka region (Lebanon) to investigate the history of the Bronze Age and its archaeological remains. It is known that in this time several cities along the Lebanese coast (most famous Byblos) traded across the eastern Mediterranean (Kopetzky, 2010). One of the most important commodities was cedar wood, which was felled in the mountains inland, transported to the coast and then shipped (e.g. Rich et al., 2016). Due to the difficult political situation and the civil war (1975 - 1990), Lebanon is not fully developed archaeologically but in recent years new sites, such as Tell Fadous-Kfarabida, have been discovered and explored (Höflmayer et al., 2014). In this work, possible settlement structures and transport routes of the cedar wood from the Lebanon Mountains to the Mediterranean coast near Chekka (Tell Mirhan) are to be identified based on a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) generated from high-resolution LiDAR (light detection and ranging) data.