Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Photography: Exploring the Medieval City of Merv, on the Silk Roads of Central Asia

Abstract

The Ancient Merv Project is a collaboration between the Turkmenistan Ministry of Culture, the Ancient Merv State Park and the UCL Institute of Archaeology. It aims to research, protect and conserve the remains of one of the great historic cities of the Silk Roads. This paper explores a new survey of the Islamic city using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle to take comprehensive and systematic vertical photographs to assist in the analysis of the medieval cityscape. The background to the research and the application of the technology are presented, together with our initial conclusions

Toward a High-Definition Remote Sensing Approach to the Study of Deserted Medieval Cities in the Near East

“…Extensive conflicts very often preclude full-scale archeological research: In many cases the only way to document and analyze archeological landscapes is to take an indirect approach based on remote sensing data. To achieve optimal results, it is necessary to combine a larger spectrum of remote sensing datasets-a practice only rarely seen in present-day research [40][41][42].…”

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