Over the Weekend (aka Day 2)

Book 1

Read about 80 pages of Sarah Parcak's Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology. It gives a good (and brief) summary of the history of remote sensing in its second chapter and introduces some of the topics she will cover later in the book.

More important than that, although valuable, was her summary of the different types of satellite data available. She covered Landsat and ASTER, two of the sensors we thought about using, in detail and gave me a better feel for how to download the data.

Along with that help (including information about resolution etc. without having to go to individual sites although I will anyways) she talked about how to obtain the data. While she did not provide a step-by-step walkthrough of how to download the data (description of the interfaces), she did explain how some of the rights to the data worked and how to use them together (ie multiple band layers). The summaries suggest that in order to use some of the ASTER data some e-mails would need to be sent to their people in order to get the data for no cost. The only thing that she states as being free from ASTER are the DEMs. I need to look into this more especially since my advisor mentioned having an account so maybe extra e-mails would be unneccessary.

note to self attempt download of ASTER DEM

Complications with her discussion thus far

There is a significant difference between what Parcak is doing in her book and what exactly this project is about. The focus of the book is on the detection of archaeological sites from satellite data rather than picking places for survey which is the focus of this project. However, the two do come together when she talks about the detection particular tells that surrounded a known fortress.

So far as I understand the project, specific identification of archaeological material is not what we want. The steps I am taking are to pick good areas for survey only and ground proofing, instead of exploring the importance of the site, would be done to assess how well the categorization of land based on remote sensing data accurately represented good places to survey.

I hope she goes a bit more into the data analysis portion of remote sensing so that I have a better understanding for what I will be doing when it comes to looking and understanding the data.