Abstract
Declassified satellite photographs are becoming an increasingly important archaeological tool. Not only are they useful for residue prospection and, when in stereo pairs, digital elevation model (DEM) generation, they can also provide large-scale temporal snapshots that provide essential information on landscape change. Importantly, in some instances, declassified photographs may be the only available record of archaeological residues that have subsequently been eradicated.
This chapter outlines a generic approach to accessing, digitising and processing declassified satellite photographs and utilising them in conjunction with modern fine-resolution satellite images. The methodological issues of acquisition and preprocessing are addressed. A number of potential archaeological applications are described and illustrated with examples from the Settlement and Landscape Development in the Homs Region, Syria (SHR) project. These examples demonstrate that there is no single approach to processing and image selection. Rather, processing is dependent upon the nature of the archaeological residues and their surrounding matrix, the type of analysis one wants to undertake and the range of ancillary datasets which can be used to ‘add value’ to the source data.
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Notes
- 1.
Photograph is used explicitly throughout this chapter to refer to a film (analogue) product. The term image refers explicitly to a digital product.
- 2.
This figure is under debate. However, it is true to say that the brain can distinguish far fewer shades of grey than colours.
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Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the Natural Environment Research Council to Beck through Award Ref. GT0499TS53 and for the purchase of the Ikonos imagery by their Earth Observation Data Centre. Thanks are due to Nikolaos Galiatsatos for help provided during the writing of this paper. The Ikonos imagery includes material © 2003, European Space Imaging GmbH, all rights reserved. corona and gambit data compiled by the US Geological Survey. We also wish to thank the British Academy and the Council for British Research in the Levant for their financial and logistical support of our fieldwork. All illustrations have been produced by the first named author. Thanks are also due to the directors and staff of the Damascus and Homs offices of the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums, Syria, for all their help and assistance during the field seasons, with particular thanks due to our collaborators: Dr. Michel al-Maqdassi, Director of Excavations DGAM Damascus, and engineers Farid Jabbour and Maryam Bshesh of the DGAM office in Homs.
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Beck, A.R., Philip, G. (2013). The Archaeological Exploitation of Declassified Satellite Photography in Semi-arid Environments. In: Hanson, W., Oltean, I. (eds) Archaeology from Historical Aerial and Satellite Archives. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4505-0_15
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