Multispectral Photogrammetry of Cultural Landscapes on the Northern Plains from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Platforms

Summary

As early adopters of technology, especially for creating accurate maps, archaeologists have been using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to discover and record archaeological features, landscapes and excavations since they became commercially available. This project tested the use of visual (RGB), near-infrared (NIR) and thermal sensors mounted on UAV platforms (fixed wing and multi-rotor) to discover and record archaeological features in their landscape context with georeferenced, high resolution imagery of two landscapes on the Northern Plains that contain a variety of cultural features, including stones circles, boulder alignments, stone cairns and medicine wheels. We created digital layers to compare with the results of conventional archaeological survey, in cooperation with an ongoing archaeological survey in the vicinity of the forks of the South Saskatchewan and Red Deer Rivers in southwestern Saskatchewan. We applied both Object Based Image Analysis (OBIA) and desktop visual examination of the imagery captured in this project in order to determine whether interpretation results were similar to conventional survey and whether conventional survey and UAV-based multispectral imagery recognized different features.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16475