Abstract
Mapping surface ceramics through systematic pedestrian archaeological survey is considered a consistent method to recover the cultural biography of sites within a micro-region. Archaeologists nowadays conduct surface survey equipped with navigation devices counting, documenting, and collecting surface archaeological potsherds within a set of plotted grids. Recent advancements in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and image processing analysis can be utilised to support such surface archaeological investigations. In this study, we have implemented two different artificial intelligence image processing methods over two areas of interest near the present-day village of Kophinou in Cyprus, in the Xeros River valley. We have applied a random forest classifier through the Google Earth Engine big data cloud platform and a Single Shot Detector neural network in the ArcGIS Pro environment. For the first case study, the detection was based on red–green–blue (RGB) high-resolution orthophotos. In contrast, a multispectral camera covering both the visible and the near-infrared parts of the spectrum was used in the second area of investigation. The overall results indicate that such an approach can be used in the future as part of ongoing archaeological pedestrian surveys to detect scattered potsherds in areas of archaeological interest, even if pottery shares a very high spectral similarity with the surface.
Highlights
Scatters of fragmented pottery found on the surface are considered as archaeological proxies, evidence of past human activity, and indicators for sub-surface archaeological features [1,2]
The scope of our study is twofold: on the one hand, it aims at evaluating the initial approach of Orengo and Garcia-Molsosa [16], providing further insights regarding the robustness of their approach, while on the other, we aim to push research by integrating multispectral cameras, covering images beyond the visible part of the spectrum, and applying deep learning detection methods
Despite the several attempts made through the parametrisation of the Single Shot Detector algorithm and the training samples, the detection rate remained relatively low compared to the ground-truthing record
Summary
Scatters of fragmented pottery found on the surface are considered as archaeological proxies, evidence of past human activity, and indicators for sub-surface archaeological features [1,2]. As a non-destructive method, intensive surface survey has been widely adopted by archaeologists since the 1960s to record potsherds, lithics, and architectural features [3,4,5,6]. Since the late 1970s, ‘new wave surveys’ in Greece and other parts of the Mediterranean moved away from earlier topographical approaches and the extensive survey tradition and formed the first generation of intensive regional surveys [7,8]. The exploration and understanding of landscape evolution, human interaction with the landscape, and settlement history from early prehistory to early modern times remains of paramount importance, and a common aim between different survey projects across the Mediterranean, from Spain and Italy to Greece and Cyprus [4,10,11,12,13,14,15]
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