Buried Archaeology

Did you know that you can spot buried archaeology from aerial imagery? You just need the right conditions for cropmarks to appear and the help of citizen scientists!

Example of archaeological cropmarks with three positive detections in the proximity of excavated structures of the ancient Etruscan city of Veii.

Check out the pilot study published in Remote Sensing (Volume 12, Issue 17, September 2020).

Huge thank you to co-authors Christopher Stewart and Daniel Lombraña González. Massive shout-out to the citizen scientists who participated. Big-up to the PhiLab at European Space Agency (ESA) / ESRIN for providing the enabling environment required to come up and follow through with super cool research projects.

An example of an archaeological cropmark with two positive detections (see black arrow). This is in proximity to the Via Nomentana. It appears to be a cropmark of a Roman villa, but more data would be needed to verify the nature of the structure.

A version of this post was first published on LinkedIn. The Microsoft products featured in this post are used with permission from Microsoft Corporation.