Recent Trends and Long-standing Problems in Archaeological Remote Sensing

Abstract

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.

Whose Data Is It Anyway? Lessons in Data Management and Sharing from Resurrecting and Repurposing Lidar Data for Archaeology Research in Honduras

“…We have benefitted from having access to the original 2k-HN-Lidar, and we want other researchers to have access to our modernized and improved dataset. This is not only to comply with the guidelines of reproducible research, but also because we believe in the democratization of geospatial data and applications (see discussions in Bevan 2015;McCoy 2017;Opitz & Herrmann 2018). In addition, because of the technical, ecological, cultural, and historical importance of this dataset, we have even considered the possibility of making it open to the public.…”

The Site Problem: A Critical Review of the Site Concept in Archaeology in the Digital Age

“…The question of efficiency is often at the center of evaluating different methods for extracting a specific class of site from remotely sensed data (see also Opitz and Herrman 2018;Sevara et al 2016). Two recent studies on islands in Western Polynesia are good examples of how the availability of highresolution airborne lidar data has turned our attention to specific types of features.…”

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

“…Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented transformation in the availability, diversity, and quality of space-and aircraft-acquired imagery, offering a dizzying range of new opportunities for discovery and interpretation of archaeological landscapes (Bevan 2015;McCoy 2017;Opitz and Herrmann 2018). Over the past decade, commercially-acquired high-resolution visible light and near-infrared optical imagery has become increasingly easy for archaeologists to access (e.g., Stott et al 2018;Kennedy and Bishop 2011;Masini 2007, 2011;Salvi et al 2011;Stone 2008).…”