Remote Sensing and Dynamic, Unique Landscape Perspectives

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Remote sensing has been fundamental since the establishment of landscape archaeology, from capturing site layout to aiding in the synthesis of human-environmental relationships. Geospatial technology and its analytical software continue to advance at an accelerated pace and are considered almost integral to archaeological research. Critical reflections by scholars about the data acquisition, analysis, and visualization remind archaeologists that remote sensing data is not neutral, even when sensors are passive. For example, decisions about processing directly tie to what we see as do features of “significance” and the scales archaeologists use to derive their conclusions. This paper considers how remote sensing, especially very high-resolution UAV and satellite-derived imagery, provides an exceptional and expressive perspective about the decisions and risks human societies engage with over time. We examine active (lidar) and passive (RGB, multispectral) data derived from case studies from the historical US Southeast, precolonial southern Africa, and precontact US Southwest to take a comparative look at the dynamic and uniqueness of 2.5/3D data. We discuss how remote sensing, as a methodological tool, can be used as a palimpsest with quantitative and qualitative attributes to conceptualize connectedness of people to place—not just what happens where, but why and why then.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36328.0