Abstract
Archaeological pedestrian survey is one of the most popular techniques available for primary detection of archaeological sites and description of past landscape use. As such it is an essential tool not just for the understanding of past human distribution, economy, demography and so on but also for cultural heritage management and protection. The most common type of pedestrian surface survey consists of fieldwalking relatively large tracts of land, recording the dispersion of items of material culture, predominantly pottery fragments, by teams of archaeologists and students. This paper presents the first proof of concept for the automated recording of material culture dispersion across large areas using high resolution drone imagery, photogrammetry and a combination of machine learning and geospatial analysis that can be run using the Google Earth Engine geospatial cloud computing platform. The results show the potential of this technique, under appropriate field circumstances, to produce accurate distribution maps of individual potsherds opening a new horizon for the application of archaeological survey. The paper also discusses current limitations and future developments of this method.
Highlights
Pedestrian survey is one of the most important and fundamental data collection techniques in the archaeologist's toolbox
Despite the fact that more ceramic fragments were recorded using total recording field survey the large amount of time necessary to conduct it makes it unpractical in terms of time-cost compared to representative results
The comparison of the results shows similar distributions, since the automatic recording was able to identify a statistically significant number of pottery sherds (32.9% of 5189 fragments in plot 36 and 76.8% of 1597 in plot 591)
Summary
Pedestrian survey is one of the most important and fundamental data collection techniques in the archaeologist's toolbox. Archaeological survey is one of the few methods we possess to quantitatively evaluate human past occupation and dispersion at a large scale and, the relevance of the data it provides goes wellbeyond archaeology. Today, “fieldwalking” usually involves systematic walking by teams of archaeologists to record surface-visible material culture, usually pottery fragments (“sherds”), and analysing the dispersion of these datable relics of human presence provide insights into changing landscape use and settlement intensity. Archaeological survey developed as a discipline since the 1950–60s and rapidly increased its application in important archaeological areas, such as Israel with 394 surveys from the period between 1989-98 (Kletter and De-Groot, 2001) and Greece with almost a hundred from 1975 to 1999 (Alcock and Cherry, 2004). Archaeological survey developed as a discipline since the 1950–60s and rapidly increased its application in important archaeological areas, such as Israel with 394 surveys from the period between 1989-98 (Kletter and De-Groot, 2001) and Greece with almost a hundred from 1975 to 1999 (Alcock and Cherry, 2004). Fish (1999), writing in 1997, documents a ten-fold increase in the percentage of articles related to settlement patterns published in leading journals since the 1960s. Alcock and Cherry (2004) estimate that millions of hectares of the Mediterranean alone had been surveyed by the beginning of the 21st century with a marked increase in survey activity since
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