Circles in the country. Prehistoric rondels in the light of remote sensing data

In archeology, we call a rondel an approximately circular object with one or more pointed ditches, palisades and monumental wooden earthworks. They have a diameter of several tens of meters in plan, but some reach up to 250 meters. Roundels were recognized by archaeologists already in the 19th century, but the boom in their research occurred with the advent of aerial archeology in the 1970s. We know them from wider Central Europe, and the examined ones belong to well-known archaeological sites. People started building circular moat areas at the beginning of the 5th millennium BC. l. and later also in the copper age, the older bronze age and the younger prehistoric age. They are also found in Southeastern Europe and on the British Isles, where the world-famous stone Stonehenge is also located. Scientists have been dealing with the questions of their function, organization and method of construction for decades.
Are they really roundels? Did we have that many in our country? Various scientific disciplines are very helpful to us in research. In addition to archaeogeophysics, we use other methods and their combinations. We work with data from remote sensing, aerial photography, Google Earth and specialized visualizations from aerial laser scanning (LLS).

Experts who take their word for it will tell you about the state of research on rondels in Slovakia, the methods of their identification, verification and the results of the current project: archeologist Mgr. Jana Mellnerová Šuteková, PhD. (Bratislava City Museum) and GIS and LLS specialist, surveyor Ing. Tibor Lieskovský, PhD. (Slovak Technical University).

(author of the background image for the invitation: Mgr. Peter Demján, PhD.; modified Archeological cafe)