Abstract
AbstractThe remembrance of the dead is a ubiquitous dimension of most human societies, and the spatial dimension of mortuary practices actively constitutes an essential element of the cultural significance of certain places in the landscape. The visual prominence of stone‐built funerary monuments in dry upland areas is particularly conducive to their multiscalar study through above‐ground remote sensing methods. In this paper, we characterize the nature and distribution of Late Holocene drystone funerary monuments in the Dhar Tagant region of south‐eastern Mauritania using freely available, very high‐resolution (VHR) satellite imagery. We contextualize them in relation to the monumental mortuary records of Senegal and Mali within the West African Sahel, exploring their similarities and differences with other monumental funerary landscapes in semi‐arid environments. Ethical considerations and a self‐reflective attitude must be at the forefront of archaeological research, and we discuss the ethics of remote sensing research in the study of funerary practices in Africa, as well as the opportunities and challenges for remote collaborative engagement with local communities in the context of fieldwork restrictions.
Highlights
The Covid-19 public health emergency is accelerating current efforts to rethink how research in a predominantly field-based discipline such as archaeology is conducted (Ogundiran, 2020; Scerri et al, 2020)
Spaceborne remote sensing relying on Very high-resolution (VHR) commercial imagery has long been associated with high acquisition costs and the technical proficiency required for the application of advanced computational methods to high-resolution commercial satellite imagery (Davis & Douglass, 2020; Klehm & Gokee, 2020)
We present here a preliminary characterization of the landscape distribution and morphometry of late prehistoric funerary tumuli in the Dhar Tagant region based on a comprehensive visual survey of freely available satellite imagery, which to our knowledge represents the first remote sensing publication aiming to analyse in depth the archaeological record of south-eastern Mauritania
Summary
The Covid-19 public health emergency is accelerating current efforts to rethink how research in a predominantly field-based discipline such as archaeology is conducted (Ogundiran, 2020; Scerri et al, 2020). The Endangered Archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project (https://eamena.org/) has developed a comprehensive image interpretation and recording based on the visual inspection of these open-access imagery portals. This imagery may not be suitable for the visual identification of archaeological features in specific geographical areas, due to the uneven coverage or visibility issues. The widespread distribution and often clustered presence of still-standing drystone structural features in semi-arid upland environments has proven conducive to remote sensing research, because they can be readily detected from VHR satellite imagery (e.g., Biagetti et al, 2017; Mattingly & Sterry, 2013; Rayne et al, 2017; Sadr & Rodier, 2012)
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