Regional-Scale Archaeological Remote Sensing in the Age of Big Data Automated Site Discovery vs. Brute Force Methods

With the ever expanding quantity of high-resolution aerial and satellite imagery available to archaeologists, numerous researchers have sought to address this big data challenge by developing automated methods to aid in the discovery and mapping of archaeological sites and features. This paper reviews several notable efforts to create automated discovery tools, including both spectral and object-based approaches, and highlights the difficulties these projects have encountered. Arguing instead for the critically important role of a human analyst in archaeological discovery, I illustrate interim results of an ongoing project that utilizes CORONA satellite imagery to document previously unknown sites in a 300,000 km(2) study area in the northern Fertile Crescent. The project is based on what I term brute force methods, relying on systematic exploration of imagery by trained analysts, and has now successfully created a database of more than 14,000 sites, some 10,000 of which are previously undocumented. Results of the project highlight the need for human intervention to make any archaeological discovery meaningful, suggesting that imagery analysis, like any act of archaeological investigation, requires an engaged, thoughtful and creative scholar.