News and Short Contributions

Abstract

The Taklamakan Desert of Nw China, the world's second largest hyperarid region, contains numerous archaeological sites where cities, forts, and religious shrines once flourished along the route of the Silk Road of antiquity. The ruins of these sites are now largely sandcovered, but digitally processed images can be used to detect and map such subsurface features. Long-term goals of this research are directed toward locating these lost settlements. Therefore, initial emphasis has been placed on use of remote-sensing data to locate ancient watercourses, along which evidence of human habitation is most likely to be found. Radar data were collected with a synthetic aperture imaging sensor carried on NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia in 1981. These data were digitized, computer enhanced, and compared with photographic and cartographic data of the same region. Computer processing sequences were developed through extensive, directed trial and error, enabling the author to elucidate previously indiscernible features such as radar rivers on a scale of tens of meters. In a continuation of this work, these enhancement sequences will be applied to available and future imaging scenes in arid regions. These data, rectified to map coordinates and overplotted with known archaeological data, will be used to direct fieldwork.