Satellite images become archaeology tool

A US researcher says he's improved the process of using computers to examine satellite images for the telltale signs of early human settlements. Harvard archaeologist Jason Ur and his colleagues developed a system to identify human habitation from factors such as soil discolorations and the distinctive mounding that results from the collapse of mud-brick settlements. They have used it to uncover thousands of new sites that could be from the earliest complex human societies, a university statement released Monday said. Ur used a computer to examine satellite images of an 8,800-square-mile area of northeastern Syria and said he's identified about 9,000 possible settlements. "I could do this on the ground," Ur said about the results of the computer-aided survey. "But it would probably take me the rest of my life to survey an area this size. "With these computer science techniques, however, we can immediately come up with an enormous map which is methodologically very interesting, but which also shows the staggering amount of human occupation over the last 7,000 or 8,000 years. "What's more, anyone who comes back to this area for any future survey would already know where to go. There's no need to do this sort of initial reconnaissance to find sites. This allows you to do targeted work, so it maximizes the time we have on the ground." To create the system described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ur worked with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.