Using remote sensing and aerial archaeology to detect pit house features in Worldview-2 satellite imagery.: A case study for the Bridge River archaeological pit house village in south-central British Columbia, Canada.
2017 (English)Independent thesis Basic level (degree of Bachelor), 10 credits / 15 HE credits
Student thesis
Abstract [en]
It is well known that archaeological sites are important sources for understanding past human activity. However, those sites yet to be identified and further investigated are under a great risk of being lost or damaged before their archaeological significance is fully recognized. The aim of this research was to analyze the potential use of remote sensing and aerial archaeology techniques integrated within a geographic information system (GIS) for the purpose of remotely studying pit house archaeology. As pit house archaeological sites in North America have rarely been studied with a focus in remote sensing, this study intended to identify these features by processing very high resolution satellite imagery and assessing how accurately the identified features could be automatically mapped with the use of a GIS. A Worldview-2 satellite image of the Bridge River pit house village in Lillooet, south-central British Columbia, was processed within ArcGIS 10.1 (ESRI), ERDAS Imagine 2011 (Intergraph) and eCognition Developer 8 (Trimble) to identify spatial and spectral queues representing the pit house features. The study outlined three different feature extraction methods (GIS-based, pixel-based and object-based) and evaluated which method presented the best results. Though all three methods produced similar results, the potential for performing object-based feature extraction for research in aerial archaeology proved to be more advantageous than the other two extraction methods tested.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2017. , p. 28+appendixes
Keywords [en]
Remote Sensing, Aerial Archaeology, Pit House Archaeology, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Satellite Imagery
National Category
Archaeology Physical Geography Earth Observation
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-25520OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hig-25520DiVA, id: diva2:1156350
Subject / course
Geomatics
Educational program
Geomatics – bachelor’s programme (swe or eng)
Supervisors
Examiners
2017-11-142017-11-132025-10-02Bibliographically approved