Archaeological Site Potential
Where ancient settlement is likely, from mounds, water, landform and soil and crop marks.
Draw an area and the tool ranks where ancient settlement is likely from seven evidence layers: mound (tell) relief, distance to water, height above the nearest drainage, slope, dry-season soil-brightness anomalies, spring crop-mark anomalies and land cover. The layers are weighted by the analytic hierarchy process, the map is generalised to about 1 km to protect unrecorded sites, and it is checked against the sites already recorded in the area.
Overview
Settlement mounds of Mesopotamia rise a few metres to tens of metres above flat plains, and their soils of ash, burnt brick and salts are brighter than the land around them; crops grow weaker over buried walls and saline mound soils. These signals are measured relative to the surroundings of every cell, so they show local anomalies rather than regional differences. Ancient sites also cluster by water on levees above ordinary floods, which the distance and height-above-drainage layers capture from a 30 m elevation model.
The result is a ranking for survey planning, not a list of sites. It is generalised to about 1 km so that it cannot guide looting. Under the Iraqi Antiquities and Heritage Law No. 55 of 2002, survey and excavation need the permission of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.
What you enter · What you get
What you enter
- Area of study (up to 600 km² for mound detection)
- Imagery year
- Importance of each layer (1–9)
- Known sites (recorded in the area, CSV or tapped)
What you get
- Site-potential map in five classes, generalised to about 1 km
- Every layer as values and ratings
- AHP weights with the consistency ratio
- Success-rate curve and frequency ratios against known sites
- Framed map sheet, layer figure, ASCII grid, CSV
How it works in the field
Method and equations
Mound relief
Elevation minus the mean elevation within about 500 m; capped at 1 m where the mean slope around exceeds 4°, because ridges mimic mounds. For the generalised map each 1 km block keeps its strongest smoothed value, so a single mound is not averaged away.
Height above nearest drainage
Elevation minus that of the nearest drainage cell: mapped water or wetland, or a stream draining at least 25 km² on the D8 network. On flat plains, where rivers drain far beyond the area, the mapped water carries the layer. 1–10 m rates highest.
Soil and crop marks
Dry-season SWIR (B11) reflectance and spring NDVI minus their local means within about 600 m, rated in standard deviations; crop marks only where the surrounding fields are green (NDVI ≥ 0.2).
Analytic hierarchy process
As in the groundwater tool: Saaty pairwise matrix, principal eigenvector, CR < 0.10; the index is block-averaged to about 1 km before classing.
Accuracy and error limits
- The map ranks relative likelihood of ancient settlement at about 1 km resolution; it does not detect sites. Tested on known tells, models of this kind typically reach a success-curve area of 0.65–0.8.
- Mound relief from a 30 m elevation model misses tells lower than about 2 m and confuses spoil heaps, dunes and embankments; soil and crop marks depend strongly on season.
- To reduce the error: check high-potential cells on historical imagery and older maps, survey them in the field with the antiquities authority, and never publish exact coordinates of unrecorded sites.
Who uses it
Standards and references
- Menze, B.H. & Ur, J.A. (2012). Mapping patterns of long-term settlement in Northern Mesopotamia at a large scale. PNAS, 109(14), E778–E787.
- Parcak, S.H. (2009). Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology. Routledge, London.
- Casana, J. & Cothren, J. (2008). Stereo analysis, DEM extraction and orthorectification of CORONA satellite imagery: archaeological applications from the Near East. Antiquity, 82, 732–749.
- Verhagen, P. & Whitley, T.G. (2012). Integrating archaeological theory and predictive modeling: a live report from the scene. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 19, 49–100.
- Wilkinson, T.J. (2003). Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East. University of Arizona Press.
- Nobre, A.D. et al. (2011). Height Above the Nearest Drainage — a hydrologically relevant new terrain model. Journal of Hydrology, 404, 13–29.
- Saaty, T.L. (1980). The Analytic Hierarchy Process. McGraw-Hill, New York.
- Iraqi Antiquities and Heritage Law No. 55 of 2002.
- Copernicus Sentinel-2 Level-2A, Copernicus DEM GLO-30, ESA WorldCover 10 m, served by the Microsoft Planetary Computer; recorded sites from OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).
At a glance
- Category
- Remote sensing
- Runs on
- Phone, tablet and desktop browser
- Export
- Map sheet PNG, layer figure PNG, ASCII grid, CSV, PDF report
- Access
- Subscribers
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