Lidar Survey Maps World War II Battlefield

News August 15, 2023

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CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND—Live Science reports that drones equipped with light detection and ranging (lidar) equipment have been used to survey the heavily wooded central zone of the Battle of the Bulge, which was fought in eastern Belgium and Luxembourg over a period of five weeks from December 1944 into January 1945. Birger Stichelbaut of Ghent University said that the survey spotted more than 900 features from the battle, including bomb craters, artillery platforms, trenches, and foxholes. Stichelbaut and his colleagues then visited the features, and were able to sort them into three distinct phases of the battle. Artillery fuses, artillery platforms, and field fortifications to the west are thought to have been employed by the Allies during a pre-offensive phase. The second phase, which began with the German offensive, is marked by German objects found at abandoned American artillery banks. Most of the bomb craters have been attributed to the final phase of the battle and the Allied use of air forces as the weather improved. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Antiquity. To read more about the archaeology of World War II, go to “Letter from Alaska: The Cold Winds of War.”

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