Resurrecting Lost Landscapes: Global-Scale Archaeological Prospection Using Cold War-Era CORONA Satellite Imagery

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Declassified CORONA spy satellite imagery, collected from 1960-1972, has proven to be a uniquely valuable resource for discovery, mapping, and interpretation of archaeological landscapes. These high-resolution, stereo photographic images preserve a picture of sites and cultural landscape features that have been impacted or destroyed by recent industrialization, urban expansion, and agricultural intensification in many parts of the world. However, there are significant technical challenges in integrating unusual cross-path panoramic CORONA imagery into modern GIS platforms, creating hurdles for archaeological research. The paper presents results of the CORONA Atlas Project, an effort that is making orthorectified CORONA imagery available across much of the globe as well as providing tools for archaeological analysis. Using examples from China, Iraq, Pakistan, Peru and elsewhere, findings illustrate some of the tremendous opportunities for archaeological prospection that CORONA imagery makes possible, while also highlighting a range of new challenges presented by the sheer magnitude of available data and the complexity of its interpretation and analysis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24854