Discernibility of Burial Mounds in High-Resolution X-Band SAR Images for Archaeological Prospections in the Altai Mountains

Abstract

Abstract:The Altai Mountains are a heritage-rich archaeological landscape with monuments in almost every valley. Modern nation state borders dissect the region and limit archaeological landscape analysis to intra-national areas of interest. Remote sensing can help to overcome these limitations. Due to its high precision, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data can be a very useful tool for supporting archaeological prospections, but compared to optical imagery, the detectability of sites of archaeological interest is limited. We analyzed the limitations of SAR using TerraSAR-X images in different modes. Based on ground truth, the discernibility of burial mounds was analyzed in different SAR acquisition modes. We show that very-high-resolution TerraSAR-X staring spotlight images are very well suited for the task, with >75% of the larger mounds being discernible, while in images with a lower spatial resolution only a few large sites can be detected, at rates below 50%.

Deciphering Circular Anthropogenic Anomalies in PALSAR Data—Using L-Band SAR for Analyzing Archaeological Features on the Steppe

“…The good discernibility of several Early Iron Age burial mounds in the PALSAR-2 images only seems to stand in contrast with our own work on burial mound identification in TerraSAR-X images [22]. In this work, we stated that high-resolution SAR images, e.g., TerraSAR-X spotlight images, are needed to clearly identify burial mounds in the Altai Mountains.…”

“…In this work, we stated that high-resolution SAR images, e.g., TerraSAR-X spotlight images, are needed to clearly identify burial mounds in the Altai Mountains. Although the burial mounds of Tunnug 1 and Arzhan 5 are much larger than the examples in [22], the PALSAR-2 results clearly show Figure 10. In a TerraSAR-X slant-range strip map HH image of the same cemetery, we can clearly understand that we are not dealing with an Early Iron Age burial mound.…”

Mapping and Damage Assessment of “Royal” Burial Mounds in the Siberian Valley of the Kings

“…The swamp is likely to contain smaller submerged monuments, but these are unlikely to be detected using optical data. As opposed to earlier studies [22], experiments with L-Band SAR have led to decent results in the detection of large stone based structures [6] but also show that, beyond the Early Iron Age burial mound Tunnug 1, there are no other monuments of similar size and composition in the vicinity. The search is therefore focused on the flat areas of the northern river terrace where steppe vegetation makes the mapping task straight forward.…”

Global-Scale Archaeological Prospection using CORONA Satellite Imagery: Automated, Crowd-Sourced, and Expert-led Approaches

“…Today, companies like Planet offer high-resolution imagery over the entire globe collected on a daily basis though the innovative use of small, inexpensive satellites, and thus in the future imagery access and availability will likely continue to increase. At the same time, technologies that penetrate vegetation canopy are making highresolution topographic datasets available the world over, through programs like TerraSAR-X, a high-resolution synthetic aperture radar satellite system (e.g., Linck et al 2013;Balz et al 2016). Even higher resolution topographic data are being collected by aircraft-based lidar programs (e.g., Chase et al 2011;Opitz and Cowley 2013;Ebert, Hoggarth, and Awe 2016;Johnson and Ouimet 2014), and while these data were once prohibitively expensive, government agencies are increasingly making these data available for free, while drone-based lidar promises to lower costs of acquisition dramatically (see VanValkenburgh et al, this issue).…”