Towards best practices for monitoring and quantifying archaeological looting with SAR
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 15/09/2020

In  the  last  decade,  satellite  images  with  very  high  spatial  resolution  up  to  less  than  1  metre  have been used as an objective source of information to detect the occurrence of archaeolog-ical looting. Both archaeologists and heritage bodies are increasingly becoming familiar with these resources acquired from space, to either perform local studies focused on single sites, or undertake more systematic mapping surveys across wide regions. We present an overview of the methods of supervised, unsupervised and (semi-)automatic image processing chains that have  been  developed  so  far  to  exploit  time  series  of  either  Synthetic  Aperture  Radar  (SAR)  or optical images, and provide a comparative assessment of the advantages and limitations of these approaches. We present the results achieved over selected case studies across the Middle East, based on change detection analysis of bespoke time series of COSMO-SkyMed SAR data, and Sentinel-2 and WorldView multi-spectral imagery. The outcomes are discussed to propose recommendations towards best practices for regular monitoring and quantitative assessment of archaeological looting using satellite technologies. This is a research domain still under de-velopment but at the same time it is highly regarded across the archaeological community in the hope to overcome the limitations of manual interpretation and counting of looting holes.


Deodato Tapete, Francesca Cigna