Archaeological Prospection最新文献

This paper presents the results of geophysical surveys conducted within two castles in central Iberia: the fortifications of Molina de Aragón and Atienza, both located within the modern province of Guadalajara in Spain. They represent essential case studies for understanding the transformations of the frontier societies of medieval south-western Europe, because both were founded during the Andalusi period, both played a fundamental role at the time of the military confrontations between opposing Islamic and Christian states, and both became capitals within the feudal dependencies of the Crown of Castile during the Late Middle Ages. At present, these castles are uninhabited and protected archaeological sites, with no modern developments within their wards; the adjacent towns have developed on the outskirts of their outer walls. Although both castles have been the focus of uneven amounts of archaeological research, geophysical surveys, the first conducted at these sites, have proved to be a fundamental tool not only for planning future archaeological investigations but also for the data that they have provided on the potential roles of these castle wards.

Climate change effects along with anthropogenic activities present the main factors that threaten the existence of heritage sites across the north Nile Delta of Egypt close to the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea. Observing the changes in the landscape close to the archaeological sites is an important issue for decision-makers in terms of reducing the negative impact of natural events and human activities. The coastal heritage sites are becoming strongly threatened by the rising sea level phenomena that will happen due to global warming. Focusing on the distribution of the archaeological sites, this study aims to detect the areas at risk of shoreline erosion or accretion in the northern shoreline of the Nile Delta. In this study, the changes in the northern shoreline of the Nile Delta were observed and calculated during the last hundred years based on the integration between the old topographic maps from surveys in 1900, 1925 and 1945, optical satellite images captured by Landsat in 1972, 1986 and 2000; Sentinel2 2021; and the Radar SRTM data. The results of this study showed that the changes were enormous with a great shoreline erosion process over the last 121 years recorded along the shoreline in the periods between 1900–1925, 1925–1945, 1945–1972, 1972–1986, 1986–2000 and 2000–2021. The areas eroded were about 5.3, 4.7, 5.6, 8.9, 2.5 and 5.4 km², respectively. Such negative movements caused the loss of two heritage sites, and the expected changes will lead to the loss of additional heritage sites in the next 500 years. Furthermore, a model was suggested for protecting the coastal heritage sites threatened by the risk of submergence. This study can help the decision-makers to detect the coastal archaeological sites at risk and create innovative solutions for protecting these irreplaceable heritage sites.

A large number of ancient remnants from the Angkor kingdom of the 15th–19th centuries are widely observable across present day north-eastern Thailand and Cambodia. Archaeologically, these features represent the ancient communities and were possibly connected according to various socioeconomic reasons. In order to reconstruct the route of human mobility between the remains, the geographic information system (GIS)-based least cost path (LCP) analysis was employed along the Angkor–Phimai route. By recognizing the geographic parameters, the mobility of 292 moated sites was tracked to eight mountain passes that traverse the barrier of the Dângrêk Mountain Range. The LCP-derived routes revealed that the Ta Muen pass was the most suitable (shortest source-to-site distance) route for almost all moated sites. When compared with a previous interpretation of the Angkorian Royal Road route, our LCP route conforms reasonably well when overlaid with this possible Royal Road. The locations of ancient activities were also in the vicinity of the dense LCP route, and most monuments were located within a 1.5 km buffer line. This underlines that the LCP track obtained in this study is reasonable with a high reliability and is beneficial for guiding further studies to find out more about the ancient remains or archaeological evidence in this area.

Geologists have long valued satellite imagery in the short-wave infrared (SWIR) part of the electromagnetic spectrum (1100–2500 nm) because it can reveal subtle differences in minerology and soil moisture that are otherwise invisible, but the low spatial resolution (20-30 m) of publicly available SWIR imagery has limited its utility for archaeological investigations. As part of a NASA-funded research project, this paper presents results of an effort to evaluate the potential of higher resolution (3.7 m), 8-band SWIR imagery from the WorldView-3 satellite programme to aid in the identification and mapping of archaeological sites and landscape features in the Fertile Crescent. With case studies in the Amuq Plain of southern Turkey, the Khabur Plain of eastern Syria, and the Diyala Plain of southern Iraq, we utilize several methods including experiments with numerous band combinations, production of band ratios designed for crop cover analysis and support vector machine (SVM) classification techniques to enhance site visibility in multispectral SWIR imagery. Results reveal some of the seasonal, land use/cover and other factors that can impact the visibility of archaeological sites and features, demonstrating the potential and pitfalls of this emerging remote sensing resource.

We surveyed in detail the Chalcolithic lithic workshop Fofanovo XIII an East Fennoscandian region by ground-penetrating radar (GPR). A high-frequency antenna unit was applied to map small-scale features, mainly waste flakes. To substantiate the efficiency of the GPR technique, we performed a primary analysis of a set of equivalent models in a sandbox. The laboratory-scale GPR investigation highlights differences in GPR patterns depending on the spatial arrangement of small features and supports the further interpretation of real-life data. The GPR survey in the field covered 2200 m², revealing areas with a high density of artefacts in the cultural layer and locating individual structural elements of the Fofanovo XIII archaeological site. We suggested using microdebitage samples from manual probing to verify the detected anomalous values of GPR attributes. The results point to a significant correlation between microdebitage and the envelope peak amplitude of the echo signal. Ultimately, our study confirmed the cultural layer in the Fofanovo XIII workshop site to be rich in lithic production wastes, indicating it was a place of mass-scale production of lithic chopping tools.

In ground penetrating radar (GPR) surveys of African-American cemeteries suspected to contain unmarked graves, determining the proficiency of a new GPR practitioner is vital and perhaps even more fundamental than that of the GPR hardware, deployment configuration and software. Proficiency may be defined as the practitioner's true-positive, true-negative, false-positive (i.e., false alarms) and false-negative (i.e., misses) percentages. We embarked on this research as a means to improve our own proficiency in unmarked grave detection and to develop an algorithm by which to improve the proficiency of any new GPR practitioner. After surveying the Salem Cemetery in Brazos County, TX, and the Old Danville-Shepherd Hill Cemetery in Montgomery County, TX, we first classified subsurface targets based on in-field, visual inspection of the real-time, onscreen, unprocessed (except for an automatic gain control) GPR B-scans. We then developed a proxy for ground-truthing that allowed us to calculate the proficiency of the in-field classifications. From this proxy, we established a quantitative prevalence threshold for identifying or rejecting a subsurface object as a target of interest. Its quantitative nature allowed us to quantitatively control and adjust that threshold, a threshold we set at 70% likely to be to a specific target of interest. We show that our classification accuracy increased from 66.2% at the Salem Cemetery to 75.0% at the Old Danville-Shepherd Hill Cemetery and, through use of diagnostic evaluations originally developed for medical imaging and herein applied to geophysics, showed that the accuracy improved due to increases in true-negative classifications, that is, in examining real-time, onscreen, mostly unprocessed GPR B-scans, discerning a potential target and correctly concluding it was not an unmarked grave. This research outlines the procedure we developed to measure the proficiency of a new GPR practitioner.

In Italy, the potential of geophysical prospection for the characterization of archaeological landscapes, especially in previously unexplored rural or formerly urban areas, has rarely been acknowledged or seriously tested in the field, leaving the character and density of rural settlement across time virtually unknown outside areas favourable to aerial survey. It is obvious, however, that the open countryside must conceal a wide variety of archaeological information, difficult to detect and analyse within an Italian research framework largely dominated in the past by field-walking survey and artefact collection. In response, this article presents some initial results and practical lessons from a programme of large-scale magnetic survey aimed at the initial exploration of the lowland landscape of the Grosseto-Roselle valley, a few kilometres inland from the Adriatic coast, in south-western Tuscany. It is hoped that the results briefly illustrated here will encourage others to undertake similar work elsewhere in Italy and around the Mediterranean as part of a move away from an essentially ‘site-based’ approach towards a truly ‘landscape’ perspective.

This paper discusses how the use of AI (artificial intelligence) detected later prehistoric field systems provides a more reliable base for reconstructing palaeodemographic trends, using the Netherlands as a case study. Despite its long tradition of settlement excavations, models that could be used to reconstruct (changes in) prehistoric land use have been few and often relied on (insufficiently mapped) nodal data points such as settlements and barrows. We argue that prehistoric field systems of field plots beset on all sides by earthen banks—known as Celtic fields—are a more suitable (i.e. less nodal) proxy for reconstructing later prehistoric land use.

For four 32.25 km² case study areas in different geogenetic regions of the Netherlands, prehistoric land use surface areas are modelled based on conventional methods and the results are compared to the results we obtained by using AI-assisted detection of prehistoric field systems. The nationally available LiDAR data were used for automated detection. Geotiff DTM images were fed into an object detection algorithm (based on the YOLOv4 framework and trained with known Dutch sites), and resultant geospatial vectors were imported into GIS.

Our analysis shows that AI-assisted detection of prehistoric embanked field systems on average leads to a factor 1.84 increase in known surface areas of Celtic fields. Modelling the numbers of occupants from this spatial coverage, yields population sizes of 37–135 persons for the case study regions (i.e. 1.15 to 4.19 p/km²). This range aligns well with previous estimates and offers a more robust and representative proxy for palaeodemographic reconstructions. Variations in land use coverage between the regions could be explained by differences in present-day land use and research intensity. Particularly the regionally different extent of forestlands and heathlands (ideal for the (a) preservation and (b) automated LiDAR detection of embanked field systems) explains minor variations between the four case study regions.