Remote Sensing Analyses on Sentinel-2 Images: Looking for Roman Roads in Srem Region (Serbia)

Abstract

The present research is part of the project “From Aquileia to Singidunum: reconstructing the paths of the Roman travelers—RecRoad”, developed at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, thanks to a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship. One of the goals of the project was to detect and reconstruct the Roman viability between the Roman cities of Aquileia (Aquileia, Italy) and Singidunum (Belgrade, Serbia), using different sources and methods, one of which is satellite remote sensing. The research project analyzed and combined several data, including images produced by the Sentinel-2 mission, funded by the European Commission Earth Observation Programme Copernicus, in which satellites were launched between 2015 and 2017. These images are freely available for scientific and commercial purposes, and constitute a constantly updated gallery of the whole planet, with a revisit time of five days at the Equator. The technical specifications of the satellites’ sensors are particularly suitable for archaeological mapping purposes, and their capacities in this field still need to be fully explored. The project provided a useful testbed for the use of Sentinel-2 images in the archaeological field. The study compares traditional Vegetation Indices with experimental trials on Sentinel images applied to the Srem District in Serbia. The paper also compares the results obtained from the analysis of the Sentinel-2 images with WorldView-2 multispectral images. The obtained results were verified through an archaeological surface survey.

Multitemporal 2016-2018 Sentinel-2 Data Enhancement for Landscape Archaeology: The Case Study of the Foggia Province, Southern Italy

“…In addition, the differences that indicate the presence of possible structures or effects of anthropogenic transformation of landscape were well delineated using the spectral separability (see Figures 5 and 6) applied to the ROIs within the individual bands and the spectral indices. The most performing indices are those involving the Green, Red, and NIR bands, such as (i) crop-band, (ii) soil-band, (iii) RN, (iv) NDVI (Table 2), as expected according to the past investigations [7,8,[11][12][13][14][70][71][72][73][74][75][76]. This is certainly due to the high resolution that the Sentinel-2 satellites have in these bands (10 m).…”

Preventive Archaeology Based on Open Remote Sensing Data and Tools: The Cases of Sant’Arsenio (SA) and Foggia (FG), Italy

“…The usefulness of the Sentinel tool for the recognition, study and safeguarding of CH has been preliminarily explored or experimentally proposed in several papers [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39].…”

Earth Observation, Remote Sensing, and Geoscientific Ground Investigations for Archaeological and Heritage Research

“…The two papers published by Wiig et al [25] and Zanni & De Rosa [26] respectively seem to contrast the controversial statements (sometimes written in the literature or claimed at conferences) that archaeologists are not familiar with satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery as a source of information for archaeological prospection due to difficulties with access, processing and interpretation of these data, and that high-resolution (HR) satellite optical imagery (i.e., 5-30 m) is of marginal usefulness in archaeology (see also [23,27]).…”

“…Zanni & De Rosa [26] tested different combinations of the spectral information collected in the 13 bands of the Multispectral Instrument (MSI) onboard the satellite Sentinel-2A of the Copernicus programme, to investigate the capabilities of these satellite data for detection of buried features belonging to Roman roads. The experimental trials were run in the Srem District in Serbia, part of the original Roman itinerary between Aquileia (Italy) and Singidunum (Belgrade).…”