Multispectral scanners are especially useful, as they provide even more information than film photography. CIR photo shows an ancient Maya causeway. Archeologist and GIS expert Kenneth Kvamme at the Univ. Multispectral Many multispectral imagers have been developed recently and used for archeology. Due to attenuation in the atmosphere, UV is seldom used.
Radar is attractive because atmospheric effects are minimized.
Thermal IR can detect different kinds of vegetation, which in turn can indicate the presence of disturbed soil, such as buried walls, middens, roadways, etc. Satellite and aircraft-mounted sensors include the Landsat Thematic Mapper, the SPOT satellite imager, Thermal Infrared Multispectral Scanner, Calibrated Airborne Multispectral Scanner, Airborne Terrestrial Applications Sensor, and Airborne Oceanographic Lidar. Additional low-cost sensors include an IR imager from Inframetrics that collects a broad thermal IR band and allows temperature measurements accurate to 0.1 deg. As always, cost is a consideration when deciding what instruments to use. A radar image strip, gathered by the Space Shuttle, is superimposed on a Landsat color image of the eastern Sahara.