Multitemporal High-Resolution Satellite Images for the Study and Monitoring of an Ancient Mesopotamian City and its Surrounding Landscape: The Case of Ur

Abstract

The paper concerns the use of multitemporal high-resolution satellite images for the study of the ancient city of Ur, in southern Mesopotamia, inaccessible to scholars from 2003. The acquired dataset is composed by two Gambit KH-7 (1966) and one Corona KH-4B (1968) declassified spy space photos and by few images taken by the recent satellites for civilian use QuickBird-2 (2002, 2004, 2007), Ikonos-2 (2008), and WorldView-1 (2008). The processing of all these images and the integration with ASTER and SRTM DEMs allowed the acquisition of new data about the topographical layout of the city and its monuments and ancient roads; the georeferencing of all archaeological remains and traces visible on the images allowed the upgrade of the archaeological map of Ur. The research also provided important data concerning the reconstruction of the surrounding landscape, where a lot of traces of old channels and riverbeds of the Euphrates were identified in areas much modified and altered during the last decades by urbanization and agricultural works. Moreover, the multitemporal images allowed the monitoring of the conservation of the archaeological area, particularly before and after second Gulf War.

The City and Landscape of Ur: An Aerial, Satellite, and Ground Reassessment

“…Archaeologists have more rarely used imagery from KH-7 GAMBIT, another Cold War-era satellite program, because of its much more limited coverage of particular hotspots and its later declassification than CORONA (images captured 1963-1967, declassified in 2002) (Di Giacomo and Scardozzi 2012;Fowler 2008;Scardozzi 2008;Ur 2005Ur , 2013b. Where available, GAMBIT provides earlier and higher-resolution images than CORONA, with a maximum resolution of c. 2-3 feet (0.61-0.91 m) ( Fig.…”

CORONA High-Resolution Satellite and Aerial Imagery for Change Detection Assessment of Natural Hazard Risk and Urban Growth in El Alto/La Paz in Bolivia, Santiago de Chile, Yungay in Peru, Qazvin in Iran, and Mount St. Helens in the USA

“…Urban expansion and growth analyses are using such satellite imagery to compare different stages of development of cities [47,48], population growth [49] and interrelations with the environment and hinterland of cities [50]. For later lines of the CORONA series, the GAMBIT and HEXAGON images, usage in archaeology also exists on the same case studies [51] and are also applied for urban land cover analysis [52].…”

Analysis and Processing of Nadir and Stereo VHR Pleiadés Images for 3D Mapping and Planning the Land of Nineveh, Iraqi Kurdistan

“…By exploiting multitemporal high-resolution satellite images, for instance, it is possible to study areas that were without documentation just few years before. Like in the work of Di Giacomo and Scaradozzi [9] where the ancient city of Ur, in southern Mesopotamia, was studied with the aid of different new satellites (QuickBird-2, Ikonos-2, WorldView-1) in comparison with older declassified spy space photos. It is also a common practice to extract 3D information from satellite dataset; the approach consists on exploiting stereo-pairs (or triplets) with an acquisition scheme insuring that every point on the ground is seen from, at least, two different points of view [10].…”