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Detecting Change at Archaeological Sites in North Africa Using Open-Source Satellite Imagery
Abstract
Our paper presents a remote sensing workflow for identifying modern activities that threaten archaeological sites, developed as part of the work of the Endangered Archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project. We use open-source Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and the free tool Google Earth Engine to run a per-pixel change detection to make the methods and data as accessible as possible for heritage professionals. We apply this and perform validation at two case studies, the Aswan and Kom-Ombo area in Egypt, and the Jufra oases in Libya, with an overall accuracy of the results ranging from 85–91%. Human activities, such as construction, agriculture, rubbish dumping and natural processes were successfully detected at archaeological sites by the algorithm, allowing these sites to be prioritised for recording. A few instances of change too small to be detected by Sentinel-2 were missed, and false positives were caused by registration errors, shadow and movements of sand. This paper shows that the expansion of agricultural and urban areas particularly threatens the survival of archaeological sites, but our extensive online database of archaeological sites and programme of training courses places us in a unique position to make our methods widely available.
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“Although the application of satellite data now allows the study of unprecedentedly large areas, the available resolution of the data is often not sufficient for in-depth assessment and identification of individual features20,21.”
From Multiscale anthropogenic feature detection in the argentinian andes: satellite machine learning, UAV, and pedestrian survey (2026) · cites this paper as [21]
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Research works printed but not linked: 27
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Herndon, K. E., Griffin, R., Schroder, W., Murtha, T., Golden, C., Contreras, D. A., Cherrington, E., Wang, L., Bazarsky, A., Kollias, G. V., et al. (2023) · Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports · doi:10.1016/j.jasrep.2023.104094 · Cited by 21
Peters, M. J. H., Jambajantsan, A., Freire, V. Z., Pey, L., Vaquer, J. M., & Roberts, P. (2026) · npj Heritage Science · doi:10.1038/s40494-026-02813-z
Metadata
- Authors
- Rayne, L., Gatto, M., Abdulaati, L., Al-Haddad, M., Sterry, M., Sheldrick, N., & Mattingly, D.
- Venue
- Remote Sensing
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Published
- 2020-11-11
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 22
- Pages
- 3694
- ISSN
- 2072-4292
- Cited by
- 57
- References
- 0
- Language
- en
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