To prevent this, the archaeologist tries to detect, document and map archaeological sites, aiming to protect them or at least to extract from them as much information as possible, before they are destroyed. In the public opinion, archaeology is mostly connected with excavation. Excavation of sites solely because of scientific interest is very rare nowadays. Therefore, a broad range of prospecting techniques have been developed. Each of these prospection techniques has different aims, methods, advantages and drawbacks.
Aerial archaeology is one of the oldest prospection methods.
A good example to illustrate this is the vertical aerial photograph of the area around Hornsburg in Lower Austria. Here, five archaeological sites can be detected within a single image, that was originally not even made for archaeological reasons. The settlements around them are in this photograph invisible, although they propably could be seen under different circumstances. Therefore, it is important, to combine different prospection techniques. Doing this, you can use the advantages of each, thus enabling optimized results.