The archaeological exploitation of declassified satellite photography in semi-arid environments.

摘要

Declassified satellite photographs are becoming an increasingly importantudarchaeological tool. Not only are they useful for residue prospection and, when inudstereo pairs, Digital Elevation Model (DEM) generation, they can also provide largeudscale temporal snap-shots that provide essential information on landscape change.udImportantly, in some instances, declassified photographs may be the only availableudrecord of archaeological residues that have subsequently been eradicated.udThis chapter outlines a generic approach to accessing, digitising and processinguddeclassified satellite photographs and utilising them in conjunction with modern fineudresolution satellite images. The methodological issues of acquisition and preprocessingudare addressed. A number of potential archaeological applications areuddescribed and illustrated with examples from the Settlement and LandscapeudDevelopment in the Homs Region, Syria (SHR) project. These examples demonstrateudthat there is no single approach to processing and image selection. Rather, processingudis dependent upon the nature of the archaeological residues and their surroundingudmatrix, the type of analysis one wants to undertake and the range of ancillary datasetsudwhich can be used to ‘add value’ to the source data.