There's Sand in the Sensor! EO approaches to interpreting delta-desert transitional environments

Summary

The complex boundary regions between deltas and deserts pose particular difficulties for archaeological enquiry. In these regions, the dynamic interactions between aeolian and alluvial processes result in continuously changing hydrosocial landscapes that manifest over a range of spatio-temporal analytical scales.

The wealth of tools, methodologies and theoretical approaches offered by the burgeoning field of remote sensing can help to deconstruct complex and often visually obstructed human geographical landscapes. Arid-margin EO approaches have increasingly incorporated multispectral imagery, thermal IR imagery, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and high-resolution UAV-based photography and photogrammetry to deconstruct marginal and transitional landscapes, and to highlight the implications for those societies who inhabited them, as well as the modern-day researchers who seek to understand them.

This paper presents a set of EO techniques to examine hydrosocial landscapes in the distal zone of the endorheic Murghab delta in Turkmenistan, and the potential to deconstruct these types of environments using aerial and satellite-based sensing techniques. Using an integrated approach, the paper evaluates the effectiveness of multispectral analysis, thermal imagery, landscape morphometry, UAV based imagery, classification algorithms and SAR data to develop an effective and transferable set of methods for examining these unique transitional zones.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Earth Observation for Archaeology in Arid Lands

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15989