Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 BP to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists by 3,000 years ago, significantly earlier than land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists. Synthesis of knowledge contributed by over 250 archaeologists highlighted gaps in archaeological expertise and data quality, which peaked at 2000 BP and in traditionally studied and wealthier regions. Archaeological reconstruction of global land-use history illuminates the deep roots of Earth's transformation and challenges the emerging Anthropocene paradigm that large-scale anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly a recent phenomenon.One Sentence Summary: A map of synthesized archaeological knowledge on land use reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists by 3,000 years ago.

The variety and sophistication of data sources, sensors, and platforms employed in archaeological remote sensing have increased significantly over the past decade. Projects incorporating data from UAV surveys, regional and research-driven lidar surveys, the uptake of hyperspectral imaging, the launch of high-temporal revisit satellites, the advent of multi-sensor rigs for geophysical survey, and increased use of structure from motion mean that more archaeologists are engaging with remote sensing than ever. These technological advances continue to drive research in the specialist community and provide reasons for optimism about future applications, but many social and technical obstacles to the integration of remote sensing into archaeological research and heritage management remain. This article addresses the challenges of contemporary archaeological remote sensing by briefly reviewing trends and then focusing on providing a critical overview of the main structural problems. The discussion here concentrates on topics that have dominated the discourse in recent archaeological literature and featured prominently in ongoing fieldwork for the past decade across three broad segments of landscape archaeology: data collection in the field, the current state of data access and archives, and processing and interpretation.

excavations conducted by the Dubai Desert Survey at Saruq al-Hadid, Dubai, have transformed our interpretation of the site from an Iron Age bronze production centre to a site with multiple occupations over the course of more than three millennia; they underline the importance of this site for understanding land use and settlement patterns in the deserts of the Oman peninsula. Saruq al-Hadid probably began as an oasis site where nomadic pastoralists during the Umm an-Nar and Wadi Suq periods camped and took advantage of a relatively well-watered landscape. In contrast, Iron Age remains at the site do not bear any definite signs of settlement per se; instead, the material culture suggests that Saruq al-Hadid may have been one of several sites in south-east Arabia that were dedicated to a snake cult. The site is capped by waste from an intensive metalworking operation that appears to have taken place during the later first millennium BC. Iron age and later remains from the site tie Saruq al-Hadid to a regional network of settlement and trade centres and suggest that, like the mountain piedmont and coasts, the sandy desert expanses of the Oman peninsula held economic and ritual importance in the overall landscape.

Regional archaeological survey in desert areas of Dubai, U.A.E., has identified numerous archaeological sites in this rapidly changing landscape. Subsurface geophysical surveys have been undertaken in concert with surface collection and test excavation to document the extent and chronology of each site. Contrary to expectations that deserts were permanently abandoned following the end of the mid‐Holocene pluvial phase around 4000 BC, two sites, Al‐Ashoosh and Saruq al‐Hadid, show evidence of substantial occupation during the late third and early first millennia respectively. These findings suggest that the Rub al‐Khali supported human settlement much later than is generally thought, challenging traditional understandings of the region’s cultural and environmental histories.

This paper presents results of recent archaeo-geophysical investigations utilizing low-frequency ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) at the site of Tell Qarqur in western Syria. Like many major tell sites in the Near East,Tell Qarqur possesses archaeological strata more than 30 min depth andwasnearly continuouslyoccupied for10 000 years.The sheer scale and complexity of tell sites has rendered traditional archaeo-geophysical methods, designed to map cultural features at 1^2 m below the surface and in only two dimensions, relatively ineffective. Theinstruments, survey strategies, andprocessingprotocolswehaveutilizedat Tell Qarqurhave succeeded in documenting architectural features and archaeological stratigraphy in three dimensions and at much greater depths than has been possible previously. Our results offer new perspectives on the organization and development of settlement at Tell Qarqur and highlight the potential of our methods for archaeo-geophysical investigations at deeply stratified sites more generally.