Investigating Continuous Archaeological Landscapes of Northern Mesopotamia
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-10-07

This paper describes our strategies for reconstructing the archaeological landscapes of the Tigris and Eastern Ḫabur Valleys of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region in northern Iraq through a combination of high-resolution multispectral satellite data, panchromatic and multispectral images from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and field-walking results. After five years of survey, the focus of the Eastern Ḫabur Archaeological Survey has shifted from the identification of archaeological sites and key landscape elements toward the investigation of the continuous archaeological landscape between cultural and natural points of interest. Emphasized here are the results from our 2017 multispectral UAV survey, which recorded more than 17 km2 of the archaeologically-rich Zagros Mountain piedmont landscape. These data, combined with WorldView-1 and WorldView-2 multispectral images, have helped us to identify landscape features that may have played a role in past settlement strategies, to discern patterns of ancient and historic land use, and to understand the broader landscape of preservation in our survey region. Most significantly, the combination of these two datasets has exposed physical remains of route systems that may have been in use as early as the Middle Bronze Age.

Full title: Investigating Continuous Archaeological Landscapes of Northern Mesopotamia through Multispectral Data from Aerial and Orbital Platforms 

(Jason T. Herrmann, Matthias Lang, Paola Sconzo)