Remote Sensing in Archaeology: An Explicitly North American Perspective

matters.

1

Introduction

Jay K. Johnson

This book began in a conversation between Marco Giardino and me at the bar in Fitzgerald's Casino during the summer of 2001. The bar top was embedded with video gaming screens and we had worked out a system whereby it took us nearly two hours to lose $10.00 playing blackjack. All that time we were supplied with free beer. Before going any further, I should mitigate this revelation by pointing out that Fitzgerald's Hotel was the field headquarters for the Ole Miss field school that year. We were working on the Hollywood Mounds, a large, late prehistoric ceremonial center at which geophysical survey techniques, particularly gradiometry and conductivity, have proven remarkably effective. Marco was working with us, wrestling with the much more difficult job of getting informative results from ground-penetrating radar (GPR) in the clays and silts of the Mississippi alluvial valley.

We were bemoaning the lack of application of these techniques in Southeastern archaeology in general and cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology in particular. As the chapters that follow will demonstrate, remote sensing, especially the geophysical techniques, has reached the point where it can make a substantial contribution to the dirt archaeology of the Southeast. However you frame the argument, whether in terms of refining the research design or of cost effectiveness, on most sites, the application of remote sensing early on in the fieldwork will lead to better results. However, on some sites you might as well leave the instruments in the truck. One of the goals of this volume is to help CRM administrators integrate remote sensing into their data-recovery programs in an informed way.

But, back to Fitzgerald's. We decided that many of the archaeologists working in the South were not aware of the remarkable advances in remote sensing applications that have occurred during the past 10 years and that what was needed was a workshop on remote sensing applications in archaeology. Marco secured funds through his office, NASA's Earth Science Applications Directorate at Stennis Space Center; I found additional support from the University of Mississippi Geoinformatics Center; and a workshop was planned for the Wednesday preceding the annual meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC), which was held in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 2002.

I got on the phone to my friends in remote sensing and in a short time assembled the impressive list of instructors represented in the following chapters. That was followed by the much more demanding task of locating and inviting the state archaeologists, state historic preservation officers, and chief highway archaeologists or their representatives from the 11 states that are traditionally represented in the SEAC membership. We planned to begin the workshop with a field trip to Tullis-Toledano Manor, a historic site in Biloxi, where there would be demonstrations of the various instruments. The afternoon would be devoted to presentations on the several major remote sensing techniques appropriate to archaeology. A reception was planned for the evening, during which we would talk about all that we had done that day.

The workshop was a success. Many of the participants expressed an interest in applying the techniques and, in fact, several were from state agencies that were already using some of the instruments. The presentations were all quite good. So good, in fact, that we decided to follow up with a one-day workshop just for the instructors in which we would work on preparing a handbook on remote sensing applications for CRM archaeologists. We met in the French Quarter in New Orleans at the Royal Sonesta Hotel and spent another very successful day talking about the focus of the publication. Then came the hard part: finding the time to fulfill the commitments we had made and actually writing the following chapters.

Although the workshop was presented to archaeologists working in the Southeast, the instructors work throughout North America and the volume reflects this broader perspective. For this and other reasons, I am pleased with the results, but, of course, the final judgment will be up to the readers. I would like to address one fundamental question, however. Was such a volume needed? There are, after all, several very good summaries of remote sensing applications in archaeology (Aitken 1961; Bevan 1998; Clark 1996; Gaffney and Gater 2003; Scollar et al. 1990), most of which have the same emphasis on geophysics that is evident in the following pages. However, there are at least three reasons to add one more book to this list.

In the first place, we are riding the crest of a technology that is advancing on a daily basis. For members of my generation, who did their dissertation research using punch cards, this is particularly evident. But the rate of advance is accelerating. This is especially true in remote sensing, in which large amounts of data must be processed in complex ways and the output is most useful in a graphic format. Driven by applications with much more economic impact than archaeology, computer graphics, memory, and processing time are improving exponentially. If you doubt that, violate the cardinal rule of buying a PC, and see what you could have gotten for the same money a month later. Scollar and his coauthors (1990) published one of the most comprehensive reviews of remote sensing in archaeology to date. Certainly it contains more formulas than any other publication on the subject. And it is still an important source of fundamental concepts. However, it came out more than a decade ago and the discussions of computer hardware and graphic presentation are useful only as a benchmark of where we've been. You can effectively date a publication by looking at the pictures.

Second, all but one (Bevan 1998) of the major publications on geophysical remote sensing in archaeology use examples drawn from European archaeology, which is at least a decade ahead of us in remote sensing applications. Another interesting thing about the European use of remote sensing is that it is an integral part of their equivalent of CRM archaeology. There is even a popular British television show, Time Team, that features applications in archaeology. Why is it that the random person on the street in London is likely to be able to discuss the relative merits of using a magnetometer rather than GPR, while many North American archaeologists are not sure what these instruments do in the first place? Part of the answer lies in the nature of the archaeology. Almost any discussion of the archaeological application of aerial photography will have a long section on crop marks, which appear to be particularly useful in discovering Roman villas and Bronze Age fortresses, site types that are uncommon in North America. Sites that predate the Neolithic are not regularly featured in discussions of remote sensing in Europe, for obvious reasons—the traces left behind are far less structured and much more difficult to detect using remote sensing techniques. This is, of course, the case with most of the prehistoric record in North America.

Finally, although most of the archaeologists who attended the workshop in Biloxi came away convinced that remote sensing will make a major contribution to the archaeology that they administer, many also expressed frustration; the successful application of the techniques relies on a great deal of expertise in archaeology, geophysics, digital image processing, and soils. When the right instrument is used on the right kind of archaeological deposit buried in the right kind of soil, the results are often spectacular. However, there is an unfortunate history of inappropriate applications in which a substantial amount of money was spent with no results. A general overview of remote sensing techniques that will guide archaeologists in the selection and application of instruments is badly needed at this stage in the development of the field. That is the major goal of this book.

The heart of the book is the applications chapters (Chapters 4 through 9). Each author was asked to cover the following topics:

Overview of the technique

Discussion of basic principles

A brief history of its application in archaeology

A summary of currently available and generally used instrumentation

A description of the typical field strategy

Some idea of the kinds of data-processing software that are most likely to be useful

Examples of successful applications

Case studies, many of which are drawn from the chapter author's (or authors’) own research

Guidelines for application

When to use which combination of instruments

Soils

Site types

Interference

Field time

Data-processing time

The final chapter (Chapter 13) brings together the data included in the concluding section of each of the applications chapters so that archaeologists can make a comprehensive decision about which remote sensing techniques to employ. The major purpose of the New Orleans meeting was to work together on the details of this chapter. No such comprehensive guide to the successful application of remote sensing techniques is currently available, but we judge that the time is right.

So, now you have some insight into the origin and justification of this volume, but before concluding this introduction, I would like to do a few more things. First, there is the not-so-trivial question of what exactly we mean by remote sensing. There was some discussion of this topic at the meeting of contributors in New Orleans. In fact, most of the geophysical techniques that have provided spectacular results in archaeology are hardly remote. Some remote sensing instruments—gradiometers and conductivity meters—are generally carried back and forth across the site 10–20 cm above the ground. GPR systems must make contact with the surface of the soil in order for the signal to propagate, and conductivity meters can be dragged along the surface. Resistivity readings are taken by inserting probes into the soil, and some susceptibility applications, as being pioneered by Rinita Dalan (Chapter 8, this volume), require that the sensor be inserted into a borehole. Compared with satellite and airborne sensors, these are obviously a different class of readings. However, geophysical techniques are still used to measure phenomena that are remote from the sensor and cannot be seen otherwise. It is just a matter of scale, as suggested by Payson Sheets (1991) in an article entitled ‘Very-to-Barely’ Remote Sensing of Prehistoric Features . . . , in which he reports the results of the application of instruments ranging from airborne multispectral scanners to GPR.

More important, there is a fundamental similarity in the way that satellite, airborne, and geophysical data are processed and evaluated. For example, the question of resolution is an important first consideration in all cases. The smaller the unit of observation—pixel size in remote sensing terms—the more likely you are to find small features and the prettier the picture. However, the finer the resolution, the more expensive the data in terms of acquisition, storage, and processing. If you are looking for broad-scale patterns, it is often unnecessary to spend the money on high-resolution images. It may even be a detriment. For example, in GPR, the higher the frequency of the antenna, the smaller the object that can be detected. However, many of the reflections that are recorded in GPR are irrelevant to understanding the cultural deposits at a site. The usual goal of a radar survey in archaeology is to detect buried structures, seen as major reflections that continue across several transects. Much of the data recovered by using a high-frequency antenna is noise.

Many of the data-processing techniques used in geophysical analysis were developed for the analysis of satellite data. A high pass filter is a high pass filter whether it is being used on digital data acquired by a sensor orbiting hundreds of kilometers above the earth or on data acquired by a gradiometer carried back and forth across the site at a distance of a few centimeters from the surface. And that filter can be applied using software written specifically for magnetic gradient data, such as Geoplot, or it can be applied using one of several programs written specifically for more traditional remote sensing analysis; ERDAS Imagine, for example.

Another conceptual advantage to the more inclusive definition of remote sensing is that many of the standard procedures of satellite image analysis hold tremendous potential in archaeology. For example, anyone who deals with geophysical data uses the basic concepts developed in geographic information systems (GIS) analysis, and it is clear that the integration of data recovered by more than one instrument is likely to increase our understanding of the structure of an archaeological site. But, as Chapter 11 on multiple instrument applications illustrates, we are just beginning to make use of the powerful tools that are available to integrate multiple kinds of spatial data.

As I have indicated, this is hardly the first book on remote sensing and archaeology. As the instructions to the chapter authors indicate, it is not meant to be a comprehensive or detailed introduction. For those of you who want to learn more or are interested in the remarkable pace of development in this area of archaeological research, there are several options.

The most comprehensive early overview of geophysical survey techniques in archaeology is more than 40 years old but still contains valuable information. Aitken (1961) reviews a field of inquiry that was hardly more than 10 years old at the time of his writing. As the title of the book, Physics and Archaeology, suggests, his topic is broader than just remote sensing, and there are chapters on radiocarbon dating and trace element analysis. However, there are also chapters on magnetic detection and resistivity surveying. Beyond the wonder the book inspires at the determination it took to use instruments that were slow and imprecise by today's standards and the time it took to record and plot the values by hand, it is also a bit humbling to realize how little we have progressed in the basic understanding of the characteristics of the archaeological record that influence the utility of these techniques. Aitken (1961:1) also makes the distinction between finding archaeological sites and exploring those sites once they are found and notes that different methods and instruments are useful in each case. For example, he includes a brief discussion of aerial photography in his chapter on site discovery, while the chapters on magnetics and resistivity deal mostly with mapping features within sites.

The National Park Service has played a lead role in the introduction of remote sensing techniques in North American archaeology. In fact, the first publication with goals that are similar to ours came out in 1977 under the title Remote Sensing: A Handbook for Archeologists and Cultural Resource Managers (Lyons and Avery 1977). Ten supplements were published, the last coming out in 1985. Most deal with regional applications with an emphasis on airborne and satellite sensors. However, Supplement 3 (Lyons et al. 1980) is an extensive bibliography, containing several entries relating to geophysical techniques along with the more numerous citations dealing with airborne and satellite sensors. Supplement 2 (Morain and Budge 1978) presents a discussion of instrumentation and contains the only discussion of traditional geophysical techniques. This short section is introduced with a definition of remote sensing that includes geophysical techniques and makes the observation that in archaeology, we take considerable interest in buried structures and artifacts, objects that are not visible to the eye and quite probably not directly detectable using space or airborne sensors. This is the area in which ground based remote sensing plays a vital role (Morain and Budge 1978:24). A summary discussion of magnetometry, resistivity, and radar concludes this section of the