Talk:Remote sensing in archaeology

Article creation
My goal with this page is to have a regionally based discussion of remote sensing techniques. I have filled in some in relation to the Peten region, but input on other regions such as the Mediterranean and the American Southwest would be welcome. I have treated the general methods section lightly, and it needs to be further fleshed out, but as I said, my primary goal was to write about the applications regarding the Maya.

Expecting Rain (talk) 22:06, 22 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the article contribs, ExpectingRain! As well as WP:MESO I've added this article to the archaeology wikiproject scope, not sure if it's consistently active but there's a chance I guess that someone will come along & help out with expansion on the technique overall and wrt other archaeological regions. Also, once the article gets linked into some of the other ones, that can often lead folks here who'll expand it. Will see how it goes. Cheers, --cjllw ʘ  TALK 08:32, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Examples
I added another example (the rediscovery of Iram in Oman) to give some breadth to the illustrations. I simply lifted the section dealing with remote sensing from the Iram of the Pillars page. I think that more examples can an should be provided to illustrate different techniques and types of targets, but that the examples should be very briefly summarized. Longer discussions (such as currently appear) could be spun off onto their own pages. Tapatio (talk) 06:59, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

sub-service?
I think that what is intended is "sub-surface", but I am not an archaeologist...110.23.118.21 (talk) 08:22, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Yep. I will update this term. Pinchme123 (talk) 17:13, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Not "Space Archaeology"
I propose eliminating "space archaeology from this page because it is an improper use of terminology already in use in the archaeology community. To understand this, please visit the Wikipedia page for "space archaeology," to see that it refers to material cultural remains outside of Earth and specific sites of exit from Earth of that material culture (as in, launch sites), and not to using remote sensing to investigate material cultural remains on Earth. Describing remote sensing as "space archaeology" when it employs satellite imagery is misleading at best. Pinchme123 (talk) 16:58, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

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"Anthropology professor is skeptical about LiDAR Maya hype"
That's the title of this article. It's an interview with Michael E. Smith who says at the end of the interview:

"these data have tremendous potential to contribute to our knowledge of the ancient Maya. They can revise our figures for Maya populations, for their farming systems, their housing and domestic organization, and other topics. But right now, these things exist only as potential results, not as actual findings. So that is the “no” sense of my answer. Right now, with the available information, we have no greater understanding of the Maya. That will have to wait until the hard work gets done. The LiDAR data have to be ground-truthed (checked on the ground), processed by computers and analyzed carefully.

It is significant that these finds are reported by the National Geographic Society, an organization whose interest in publicity and spectacular claims often takes precedence over their interest in solid scientific results. Many public announcements of archaeological findings are based on technical articles published in peer-reviewed journals. That is a sign that there has been a real advance, sanctioned by colleagues and journal editors. The new LiDAR finds have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, because they are still preliminary. Another feature of the hype that comes from an organization like National Geographic Society is that the finds are announced as if they were the first time anyone though to apply LiDAR to the Maya area. But in fact, archaeologists have used LiDAR in other parts of the Maya zone for seven or eight years now."


 * I just found a more detailed article by him. Doug Weller  talk 17:36, 19 February 2018 (UTC)