## 3 Case Study--The Partly Deserted Village of Qazbagi (Iraqi Kurdistan)  
The Qazbagi village (also known as Qazbaki, Qazyakan, Qazbarya, \(\bigotimes\)-? ; 35.9636147 N, 44.8243258 E) lies at an altitude of 700-750 m above sea level, in the region of the Koya (Koisnja) district, Erbil Governorate, Iraq. The village is located about 20 km southeast of the city of Koya and 8 km north of the Little Zaab river at the foot of the Haibat Sultan Dagh mountain range, under a massive Proluvial gravel-sand cone. The topography of the village of Qazbagi can be characterized as that of an agricultural village of irregular cluster plan with a central road that leads to the village from the west and turns north (Figure 5). Preprocessing of the input data collection primarily involved preparation and editing of historical satellite images. All the images, obtained via the USGS Earthexplorer platform in digital form, first had to be clipped to a size that covered only the area of interest, thus significantly reducing the demands on hardware requirements for high-volume data processing (KH-9 Hexagon images have a 6-7 GB size per single image). This step was followed by a phase of georeferencing and orthorectification of partial images onto the base layer and DEM. The satellite image (2019), freely available from the ESRI portal, was chosen as the background layer for georeferencing. DEM Alos Palsar (resolution 12.5 m) was used for orthorectification. In the context of research into the urban environment and in an effort to obtain the most accurate background layers for analyses, this distinction is not very appropriate but, in our case, it is (currently) the only one available. Georeferencing and orthorectification were applied manually in the ArcGIS Pro software environment. Figure 4: Methodological workflow of the project. When georeferencing data of various origins and resolutions, it is always necessary to confront the issue of positional deviation of images, which is caused by the extensive variability of image skew according to the parameters during acquisition. Especially in the case of large-format KH-9 Hexagon images, the position of the area of interest within the image is crucial. If it occurs at the edge of an image, the amount of distortion is skewed by 20\({}^{\circ}\) or more. It is necessary to deal with this issue during the preparation of the dataset and consider the effectiveness of using an image with such a high degree of distortion of topographic data outside the image center. As part of the analysis of the topographic development of the Qazbagi village settlement, images in which the village was captured at an angle of inclination of more than 10\({}^{\circ}\) were excluded. The resulting dataset for topographic mapping had a total of six underlying rasters. Five images represented the outputs of the KH-9 Hexagon system in chronological order from the oldest to the most recent (1972-1975) and one was generated by the OrbView-3 system. Very high-resolution images of freely available map systems were used to create a layer of the current appearance of the village. Vectorization (digitization) of surface anthropogenic ricles in this case was implemented manually was implemented manually. Semi-automated pixel-based analysis and object-based analysis were excluded due to the high variability of the morphological aspects of features. Within the vectorization, it was necessary to combine all the available views of the area of interest to achieve the most comprehensive result. In this regard, the  
Figure 5: Definition of the study area of Qazbagi village (white dot). The white line demarcates the Archaeological Survey of Koi Sanjaq/Koya (ASK) project area. need to use a multi-temporal approach with remote sensing datasets is readily apparent (Figure 6). Individual features were digitized according to two basic categories: chronological and functional classification (buildings, field system, water streams, roads).