Multi-Spectral Images for Settlement Survey in Northeastern Syria

D.C. Comer and M.J. Harrower, Mapping Archaeological Landscapes from Space, SpringerBriefs in Archaeology, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-6074-9_18, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract Nearly all Near Eastern surveys have employed some form of satellite remote sensing, although usually at coarse resolution or for very limited study areas only, and nearly always in a qualitative fashion. In this chapter we brie fl y review the multiand hyper-spectral remote sensing approaches that have been used in archaeological survey in the Near East, and report on a novel satellite remote sensing approach we recently developed. This approach recognizes anthropogenic sediments via scenes from multi-spectral ASTER images using a multi-temporal classi fi cation strategy, guided from results of a visual inspection of CORONA images. We apply it to the Khabur Basin, in north-eastern Syria, returning a probabilistic map of anthrosols that is indicating the locations of some 10,000 settlement sites of all times – from the eighth millennium B.C. to modern – at a resolution of 15 m for an area of about 22,000 km 2 and with an accuracy that is comparable to modern ground survey. This makes it, to the best of our knowledge, the largest systematic satellite imagery based survey in archaeology. Our multi-temporal classi fi cation strategy can integrate information from any other multior hyperspectral sensor, and it will easily generalize to other related detection tasks in archaeological remote sensing.