Remote Sensing and Ground Truthing: Re-Visiting the Middle Khabur, Northeastern Syria

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Between 1986 and 1994, the Yale University Khabur Basin Survey Project (KBP) carried out archaeological surveys of the middle Khabur region of northeastern Syria and recovered ceramic and lithic artifacts from 257 sites dating from the Palaeolithic to the Ottoman period. Following these ground investigations, in 1998, Nicholas Kouchoukos used Landsat images to assess environmental variables for the sites that had been discovered for his dissertation. Subsequently, Smith carried out a comprehensive analysis of CORONA images from the 1960s and 1970s for his 2015 PhD dissertation, identifying potential archaeological sites over this large region. From 2020, Tonoike and Hole, as part of the final report of the KBP, used a combination of GPS points, hand-marked sites on topographic maps, field notes, and Google Maps satellite imagery in an attempt to plot all sites in the survey area. This paper compares the results of these various survey methodologies and interpretations, and emphasizes the efficacy of combining diverse remote-sensing data together with ground truthing and experiential knowledge of the regions to provide a holistic view of a complex archaeological landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38449.0