Science: When carried aboard an airplane, lidar can map ground details that are hidden by vegetation. It has been used to reveal cities lost to time in South America or around the Mediterranean. Now lidar has revealed details of the agrarian past of parts of New England. Katharine Johnson and William Ouimet of the University of Connecticut used lidar to map areas around three rural New England towns. Around Ashford, Connecticut, they found a network of roads that were marked by stone walls, much of which were buried. The area around Westport, Massachusetts, showed similar walls that marked property boundaries, and a dam and the walls of a sawmill were found near Tiverton, Rhode Island. Following the industrialization of agriculture, many farms were abandoned as owners moved to cities. Lidar mapping can be used to study the ecological history of the areas reclaimed by forests and to reveal sites of interest to historians and archaeologists.
