Summary
UAVs are becoming common tools for documenting archaeological sites. In combination with SFM software, low altitude aerial images taken with UAVs provide an efficient and rather simple way to produce orthoimages and surface models of sites and landscapes at a detailed scale. Various factors might influence the characteristics of the final products obtained (in terms of accuracy and resolution): flight altitude, number and quality of the images, extent of the overlapping, camera resolution and sensor quality. In this paper, I?ll present the results of the UAV-based documentation of a group of ancient sites and cultivation fields in the Atacama desert. Two different UAVs and cameras were used, which allows a comparison among them and an assessment of what factor(s) were more influential in the accuracy and resolution of the final products. The paper does not aim to be a thorough analysis but just to offer an exploratory approach to that.